Oral Tradition, 15/2 (2000): 306-376
Kōnodai senki: Traditional Narrative and
Warrior Ideology in Sixteenth-Century Japan
S. A. Thornton
“Tradition” is routinely invoked as an appeal to the past in order to
legitimate the interests of the present. So, too, traditional narratives—in
whole, in part, or in new combinations—are marshalled to legitimate new or
foreign ideologies. For example, the author of Beowulf effectively combined
traditional Anglo-Saxon prosody, Scandinavian history, folk tale, and myth
both to present an idealization of traditional kingship and to condemn it: not
even the best of kings, not even a Beowulf, is capable of fending off forever
the inevitable and ineluctable disasters of internecine warfare arising from
the horizontal and egalitarian structure of Germanic-Scandinavian society
and the very competition for kingship itself.
In Japan, too, traditional narratives and narrative strategies have been
employed to legitimate new power centers and their sources of authority.
This pattern is clearly seen in Kōnoda isenki (Chronicle of the Battle of
Kōnodai),1 a sixteenth-century account of the battle in 1538 that finalized the
transition of power from the old shogunal (military dictatorship) ruling
family to a new warlord family in the area, still called the Kantō, around
what is now Tokyo.
Historical Background
Between 1185 and 1867, Japan was ruled by a series of three warrior
governments that were legitimated by the emperor’s appointment of a major
1
For the text, see Hanawa 1977a. The numbers in parentheses refer to the lines in
the text, which are not numbered in the Japanese text but are numbered in my translation.
The author wishes to thank the Women Historians Reading Group of the History
Department at Arizona State University for reading the article and making valuable
comments that resulted in this version.
JAPANESE TRADITIONAL NARRATIVE
307
warlord to the position of seiitaishōgun, the military commander
commissioned to pacify barbarians on the frontier.2 The second of these
warrior governments was the Ashikaga shogunate (1336-1573). The
Ashikaga family headed a weak coalition of warrior families of roughly the
same status and strength as its own that held together as long as they faced a
common enemy. However, once the Ashikaga house had managed to defeat
or coopt all its rivals in 1392, it immediately found itself challenged by its
allies and even by the cadet house that had been established in the town of
Kamakura (an hour west and south of Tokyo by train) to rule the Kantō and
the north for the main house.
The power of the Ashikaga shogunate was broken by the civil war of
1467-77, the O±nin War. Succession disputes not only in the Ashikaga main
house but also in major warrior families serving the house (and often
instigated by the shogunate) resulted in internecine warfare: there was no
primogeniture to determine succession, and endemic factionalism in the main
house based in the capital extended down to the vassals in the provinces. By
the 1490s, Japan had devolved into some two hundred larger and smaller
independent domains. Although mortally wounded, the Kyoto Ashikaga
shogunate, like Madame Butterfly, took a long time dying: the coup de grâce
was delivered by a warlord who ejected the last Ashikaga shogun from
Kyoto in 1573 and began the process of reunifying Japan.3
The breakdown in the Ashikaga shogunate based in the capital was
paralleled by the breakdown of the Ashikaga military government in the
Kantō. After raising a major rebellion against the shogunal house in 1439
and assassinating the head of their own main vassals, the Uesugi, the
Kamakura Ashikaga were forced out of their capital by the Uesugi and
established themselves at Koga in the 1450s. The Uesugi requested that the
Kyoto main house provide a replacement to head the Kamakura Ashikaga
house, and a younger brother of the shogun was sent. Bringing bad habits
from the capital, he favored the younger son to succeed him and was
2
The three shogunates are the Kamakura Shogunate (1192-1333), the Ashikaga
Shogunate (1336-1573 [Japan was politically fragmented as a result of the O±nin War of
1467-77]), and the Tokugawa Shogunate (1603-1867). Between 1333 and 1336, there
was a brief attempt to restore imperial rule, and between 1573 and 1603 Japan was
gradually reunified under two warlords who, because of their descent, were precluded
from appointment to the position of shogun, which was reserved for descendants of the
Minamoto.
3
The capital city was officially named Heian-kyō but called more generally
Miyako, “the capital.” For the sake of convenience, I will refer to it by its modern name,
Kyoto.
308
S. A. THORNTON
subsequently assassinated by the elder in 1491; he was “avenged” by a vassal
of the neighboring province of Suruga, one Ise Nagauji (Hōjō Sōun; 14321519), who took over the entire province of Izu, in which Kamakura was
located.4
The Ise served the Ashikaga shoguns in a variety of capacities as
specialists in court ceremony, bureaucrats and functionaries, and even as
tutors to the Ashikaga heirs. Ise Nagauji had served Ashikaga Yoshimi
(1439-91) until 1468 (Steenstrup 1974:284). To legitimate his new position,
Nagauji married his son Ujitsuna (1487-1541) to a descendant of the family
that had controlled the previous warrior government and took their name,
Hōjō. Thus he tried to erase his connections to a house subordinate to the
Ashikaga and to create an identification with the family of the previous
regime.
The Ise or Odawara Hōjō, as they are now called, became one of the
leading forces in the east and north and controlled the provinces of Izu,
Sagami, and (most of) Musashi. In establishing themselves as a power in the
eastern part of Japan, the Ise Hōjō had taken advantage both of the
breakdown of the Ashikaga cadet house and of the competition between the
two branches of the Uesugi family serving as the Kamakura Ashikaga’s
hereditary chief ministers or deputies. In the process of consolidating their
power, the Ise Hōjō found it expedient to use a descendant of the Kamakura
Ashikaga to bolster their authority. To this effect, Hōjō Ujitsuna married his
daughter to Ashikaga Haruuji (d. 1560), son of Takamoto, the “Prince of
Koga” (Koga kubō), and in the 1520s fought the Uesugi in their name.
Takamoto’s younger brother Yoshiaki (d. 1538), after a disagreement
with his father and brother, left Koga. In 1517 he was invited by Takeda
Nobukatsu Jokan, who held Mariyatsu Castle in Kazusa Province, to help him
in his campaign against a vassal of the Chiba of Shimosa Province. In that
campaign, Yoshiaki apparently made a name for himself as a soldier and was
installed in that vassal’s castle Oyumi; he was therefore called “Prince of
Oyumi” (Oyumi gosho).5 He then allied himself with a major rival of the
Hōjō, Satomi Yoshitaka (1512-76) of Awa Province, in the hope, of course,
4
All names are given in the Japanese style, with the surname or family name first
and the personal name second.
5
The title kubō was first used for the emperor and during the Ashikaga period for
the shogun. For the Kamakura Ashikaga, who had been established as kanrei or Deputy
to the shogun, to assume the title was in effect to challenge the shogun’s authority by
asserting parity of status. The title gosho means literally “imperial palace” and was used
for the palaces of the shogun and of the Kamakura Ashikaga. By extension, it referred to
the occupant of the palace; in Japan, you are where you are.
JAPANESE TRADITIONAL NARRATIVE
309
of taking over leadership of the Ashikaga family and of restoring its power in
the Kantō.
The situation was resolved by this battle at Kōnodai, which took place
on the seventh day of the tenth lunar month of 1538 in what is now Ichikawa
City, Chiba Prefecture, which borders Tokyo on the east. Ashikaga Yoshiaki
and Satomi Yoshitaka took up a position on the Ichi River (Ichikawa, more or
less on the border between Musashi and Kazusa Provinces); Hōjō Ujitsuna
and his son Ujiyasu (1515-70) marched out from their base at Edo Castle. In
the battle Yoshiaki, his eldest son, and his brother Motoyori were killed;
Satomi Yoshitaka escaped. Their victory in this battle secured for the Hōjō a
position in the area that was dominant but not unchallenged (Ichikawa 197175, ii:232-41).
The Text
The Battle of Kōnodai was composed some time before the date of a
colophon, at the end of one of the several surviving manuscripts, indicating
that in 1575 (Tenshō 3.8.11)6 it was catalogued or filed together with two
other texts whose narratives were connected with that of the Kōnodai. The
manuscripts have not been collated, but there does not appear to be any great
variation except that some copies are bound together with the abovementioned texts and others are not (Kami 1977:85-86).
The text was block printed by Hanawa Hokinoichi in the early
nineteenth century in the series now called the Zoku gunsho ruijū. This is the
text I am using. As printed in the modern edition, the text runs to a short
eleven and one-half pages or 603 lines of varying length. Probably because
of its length, there are no subdivisions such as chapters.
Kōnodai is written in a style called wakan konkōbun, which mixes
Chinese characters and the Japanese syllabary called hiragana and follows
Japanese rather than Chinese word order (kanbun), which was used regularly
only by clerics and high-ranking aristocrats. The balanced mix of Japanese
and Chinese was commonly used in writing literary prose and was certainly
easier to read, especially by a performer reading out loud to an audience. In
addition, the text’s sentences are broken up into small units: a grammatical
sentence (with a verb ending in a sentence-ending inflection) can run to
several lines, but a line can be as short as one word, a name in a list. The
punctuation is indicated by small circles, which function like commas and
periods.
6
Third year of the Tenshō era, eighth month, eleventh day.
310
S. A. THORNTON
Although there is little actual documentation of the battle, there are
other extensive narratives besides the Kōnodai senki.7 The earliest is the
1538 account written a bare eighteen days after the battle, Oyumi goshosama onuchiji ikusa monogatari (The Battle Tale of the Death of the Prince
of Oyumi; Bōsō Sōsho 1912, i:189-95). Also very short (five pages in the
modern print edition), it may be the original of which Kōnodai was a
reworking (Kami 1977:96); it certainly shares many features with the
Kōnodai , including its pro-Hōjō sympathies. Other accounts of the battle
are found in a series of histories of the Kantō region written in the
seventeenth century and later: Sōshū hyōran ki (Chronicle of the Military
Disturbances in Sagami Province; Hanawa 1977c), Hōjō ki (Chronicle of the
Hōjō; Hanawa 1979a), Satomi kyūdai ki (Record of Nine Generations of the
Satomi; Hanawa 1979b), and others. The accounts drawn from the Satomi
side diverge significantly from the others in that they relate little or nothing.8
What interests the historian is how different the description of the
event in the Kōnodai senki is from the later historical texts. For example,
Kōnodai ’s narrative is written in a style so terse and elliptical as to suggest it
was written for insiders: one could not possibly understand what was
happening without already knowing the context of the event and details of
the battle. Indeed, the text actually omits certain critical information. The
battle is framed as a confrontation between Hōjō Ujitsuna and Ashikaga
Yoshiaki. Two very important characters are left out of the discussion
altogether. The first is Yoshiaki’s elder brother Takamoto, the Prince of
Koga, and father of Ujitsuna’s son-in-law. According to the 1538 Oyumi
mentioned above, Takamoto had given Hōjō Ujitsuna an official order
(gonaisho, in his capacity as titulary head of the Kamakura military
government) to attack Yoshiaki (Bōsō Sōsho 1912, i:190). This detail is
missing from the Kōnodai. Fifty years after the fact, the Ashikaga were
hardly relevant and no longer needed as a source of authority for the Hōjō
action. Further, the Kōnodai, like the Oyumi, does not mention the Satomi.
Neither in 1538 nor in the early 1570s did the Hōjō care to hear that there
was serious opposition to their control of the Kantō. The neglect to include
the Satomi in accounts of the death of Yoshiaki may stem from the fact that
Satomi Yoshitaka was still alive and kicking: he continued successfully to
challenge the Hōjō until his death in 1574. In fact, his heirs continued to
7
For a collection of available materials, see Ichikawa 1971-75, v:405-38 (for both
battles).
8
The different sources for the history of the battle have been examined and are
not of importance here. See Satō 1925.
JAPANESE TRADITIONAL NARRATIVE
311
resist Hōjō encroachment vigorously and participated in Toyotomi
Hideyoshi’s 1590 campaign to destroy the Hōjō, the last major campaign in
the reunification of Japan.
Indeed, the cavalier treatment of the date of the battle in the Kōnodai,
which is given as a year earlier, and the indication of the date itself by what
Kami Hiroshi calls a “traditional circumlocution”—“around the first ten
days of the month of the sixth year of Tenbun [1537] or so they say” (line
4)—suggest that history is not the point of this account (Kami 1977:86-87).
Kami has analyzed the Kōnodai as a collation of contemporary sermon
materials, popular narratives, performing arts, and poems (ibid.:96-97). His
focus is on the Kōnodai as a representative of one strain of late-medieval
battle literature that was heavily influenced by contemporary narrative
performing arts, both elite and popular. However, a close examination of
the text reveals that something more than entertainment (in the sense that
tragedies like King Lear or Hamlet are entertainment) is being offered here.
It may look like a tour de force anthology of allusions to and characters,
themes, scenes, and poems from well-known narratives old and new, but it
also disguises and at the same time foregrounds an assertion of Hōjō
legitimacy and the right to rule. Traditional narrative strategies represented
by that patchwork are used to define—and to console—the losers of the
Battle of Kōnodai as the latest victims of the onset of a cosmic cycle of
decline, a period of the decline of Buddhism and the polity associated with
it. The victory of the winners, on the other hand, is vindicated by a
competing warrior ideology of rational conduct derived from Confucianism:
the right to rule earned by proper lord-vassal relations, proper strategy, and
proper consideration of omens and the Japanese gods. As the account of a
battle that is based on narrative strategies identified with oral composition,
which incorporates a wide variety of available Chinese and Japanese literary
topoi and provides interrelated religious and political interpretations of the
events, Kōnodai senki demonstrates the same form and function of other
examples of the genre of battle narratives known as gunki monogatari.
On the gunki monogatari as Genre and Object of Scholarly Inquiry
It is not my intention to rehearse the history of the classification of
gunki monogatari as a distinct genre of battle literature. However, since
there is so little available in Western languages on the topic, perhaps a short
introduction is in order. The gunki monogatari, “war tale” or “epic,”9 is a
9
I use “battle narrative” to refer to any account of battle or war in any genre.
312
S. A. THORNTON
narrative whose subject is a battle or war in which a great family is
destroyed.10 An epic is never the story of a victory, but of a great tragedy.
The key word is metsubo, “fall” or “destruction,” or a variation. Indeed, the
original title of our text is “The Downfall at Kōnodai” or Kōnodai
gobotsuraku no koto (line 2; Kami 1977:86).
The epic is usually a compilation of many accounts culled from many
sources including diaries, official records, old war stories, and religious
stories about those defeated and killed, about the victors shocked by the
horror of battle into leaving the world, and about the servants, lovers, wives,
and mothers who entered religious life to pray for the souls of the dead. The
epic usually begins with a sermon-like introduction and ends with a peaceproducing account of an imperial/shogunal reconciliation or with a
pacification ritual. It is true that not all gunki monogatari share all the same
features, but they do share enough of them to be recognized as belonging to
the same genre.11
Of the several hundred surviving examples of Japanese battle
literature, including variations, over ninety percent were produced between
1375 and about 1600. However, only a handful of texts from the tenth
through fourteenth centuries have received significant attention. Further,
until the 1970s, only these few were generally recognized as gunki
monogatari or senki monogatari (battle tales): the best-known include the
Hōgen monogatari (Tale of the [Disturbance] of the Hōgen Era), Heiji
monogatari (Tale of the [Disturbance] of the Heiji Era), Heike monogatari
(Tale of the Heike), and Taiheiki (Chronicle of the Great Pacification).12
“War tale” seems to be acceptable to Japanese scholars; see, for example, Yamashita
1976.
10
Tomikura 1963:10; Takagi I. 1956:235; Takagi T. 1936:194.
11
The standard definitions have been based on only those narratives produced
between about 1200 and 1400 (Sugimoto et al. 1963:80).
12
See, for example, Sugimoto et al. 1963, which lists and discusses fully and
individually seven gunki monogatari through the Taiheiki and lumps together the
production of the next two hundred years in a four-page review before discussing the
Gikeiki and Soga monogatari. Even Tomikura Tokujirō admits that the 1393 Meitokuki,
which he edited, is not considered to rank with either the Heike monogatari or the
Taiheiki (Tomikura 1941:180). Kajiwara observes that Meitokuki does not have the scale
of the other two, i.e., that it is a shorter work (1970:41-42). Ichiko Teiji states explicitly
that the Meitokuki, Kakitsuki, Ōninki, and Yūki are not to be ranked with the Heike or
Taiheiki (1957:232).
JAPANESE TRADITIONAL NARRATIVE
313
The restricted focus on the gunki monogatari was the result of research
interests dominated by two main fields, literature and folklore. Literature had
two major influences. The first was to restrict research to a few texts on the
assumption that only they demonstrated the literary quality that made them
worth studying. The judgment of quality was based on characteristics such
as faithfulness to historical facts and the expression of morality, ideals, or
intellect (Takagi I. 1956:235).13
The second influence of the field of literature in limiting the focus of
research to such a small proportion of the narratives has been the need to
establish the relationships among the variants preserved in manuscript and
sometimes block print. This line of research calls for a daunting breadth of
paleographical and philological skills; however, as the variants are many, so
must the texts be few. Moreover, this line of research has been dominated by
a kind of textual fundamentalism: the search for the true, original text buried
in the accretions of the so-called expanded text.14 On the one hand, one
could trace the development of a text like the Heike monogatari in all its
stages back to the diaries and other documents on which the original text had
been based. Kenneth Dean Butler’s “The Textual Evolution of the Heike
monogatari” is an excellent representative of this approach (1966).
Nevertheless, this line of research could also be taken as indicating that the
object was to identify and recover a first and original composition buried in a
given text, to strip it of its additions and interpolations, and to reinstate it as
the true and authentic version.
However, more recent scholarship recognizes that the process of the
development determines the genre, that the end product, the expanded text,
is the gunki monogatari. This reevaluation of the war tale as a genre was
initiated by a younger wave of Japanese scholars15 who had allied
themselves with senior scholars in the field of folklore.16 They looked at the
“accretions” and the process of expanding the text to redefine the genre and,
on that basis, added to the list of texts at least five examples from the period
13
See also Takagi T. 1936:194 and Tomikura 1963:10.
14
Analysis of the process of developing a gunki monogatari, for example,
presumes that one starts out with a purely historical or documentary account to which
legends or setsuwa are added. See Butler 1966:n. 6, Kajiwara 1970, and Kanai 1967:18990.
15
For example, Kajiwara 1970 and Kami 1970.
16
Fukuda Akira and Kadokawa Gen’yoshi, among others.
314
S. A. THORNTON
after 1375, including Kōnodai.17 In particular, they looked at the accretion of
popular religious material to define the genre: stories about taking the tonsure,
the origins of sacred objects, the practical and spiritual benefits of specific
practices, the attainment of paradise, and sermons. Japanese scholars refer to
the religious material in the gunki monogatari as the “sermon” (shōdō) aspect
and have recognized the specific importance of this religious material in
defining the gunki monogatari as a distinct genre of battle literature.18
If the product of the research of specialists in literature was usually
reduced to graphs elaborating the relationships among manuscripts and text
variants, then the result of the folklore wing of research was the recovery of
what was thought to be historical evidence of contemporary religious beliefs
and practices as well as the institutions by which these materials were
generated and transmitted.19 As might be expected, such divergence in aims
and methodologies resulted in a real difficulty in defining the gunki
monogatari as a genre. For example, in 1963 a special issue of a journal on
the gunki monogatari offered a “dictionary” that could not define gunki
monogatari with any more precision than as literary narratives about battles
and incidents surrounding those battles (Sugimoto et al. 1963:80). Thus,
really almost any account in which a battle was described could be included:
the biography of a war hero, a vendetta.20 Nevertheless, on one point all
17
The other four are Meitokuki (Chronicle of the Meitoku Era; 1393; Tomikura
1941), Ōtō monogatari (Tale of [the Battle of] Ōtō; after 1400; Hanawa 1977b), Yūki
senjō monogatari (Tale of the Battlefield of Yūki; after 1488; Hanawa 1940c), Sasago ochi
no sōshi (Story of the Fall of Sasago Castle; 1543?; Hanawa 1940b) and Nakao ochi no
sōshi (Story of the Fall of Nakao Castle; 1543?; Hanawa 1940a). See further Kajiwara
1963:17, Kami 1960a (for Sasago and Nakao), and Kami 1960b (for Kōnodai).
18
Kami 1970:73, 76; Kajiwara 1970:49-53. Kajiwara uses the term, but not as a
category, preferring a different term for each kind of religious story discussed.
19
Many folklorists try to puzzle out how the expanded text came to be expanded
and occupy themselves in identifying oral-derived material as the product of religious
propagandists and then, on the basis of that material, with reconstructing contemporary
religious practices and beliefs. For example, see Sugimoto 1985:82-101; Fukuda 1981;
and Kami 1960a:93-94 for the work of Usuda, Morogi, and Fukuda.
20
The section on battle literature between about 1400 and 1600 lists six types
depending on content: 1) disturbances in the government, 2) records of the battles of
specific houses, 3) accounts of the careers of individual warriors, 4) battles and incidents
in specific areas of the country, 5) specific battles, including the battle at Kōnodai, and 6)
memoirs and reminiscences of individual warriors (Sugimoto et al. 1963:117). In fact,
the same incident could be described in a variety of genres, contexts, and writing styles.
JAPANESE TRADITIONAL NARRATIVE
315
scholars seem to be agreed: of these texts, the single most representative and
most important is the Kaku’ichi variant (by 1371) of the Heike monogatari.
The definition of the Kaku’ichi Heike monogatari as an epic poem
(jojishi) as far back as 1910 (Yamashita 1994:9-16) offered a point of
commonality for both wings of scholarship, even if this was not immediately
realized or articulated. The definition of epic in Western literary theory
included texts as divergent as Gilgamesh, the Odyssey, the Inferno, and
Paradise Lost, but all with considerable literary reputations that, of course,
invited favorable comparisons with the Heike. Thus, for example, when
Kenneth Dean Butler declared in 1966 (5) that “the Heike monogatari [was] a
true epic of major proportions” and might be considered “the national epic of
Japan” comparable with the Poem of the Cid, the Song of Roland, and
Beowulf, he was not saying anything particularly new. However, when in
1967 he introduced the oral composition theories of Milman Parry and Albert
Lord to a symposium in Japan, the impact on research on the Heike
monogatari and other areas was considerable (Yamamoto 1976:100). Parry
and Lord are now cited in Japanese scholarship on oral narrative, as are Ong
and Bowra.21 Now one speaks of gunki monogatari, of Japanese epics, as
texts that derive their meaning in good part from the “structural integers
(formula, theme, story pattern) perceived as constituents” (Foley 1992:279) of
a traditional narrative form.
Thus, the only way to guess at what a gunki monogatari might be was to examine the
texts chosen for inclusion.
21
Yamashita 1994:13, 45, 47; Murakami 1992:26-27, 46n. Even though
contemporary scholarship on gunki monogatari may not use the diction of oral
composition theory, scholars are sensitive to its methodology. For example, at the 1997
symposium on the Heike monogatari at Cornell University, three papers dealt with the
reception and rewriting of narratives on the models of existing traditional themes: one
used the literary term topos (Watson 1997), one the more general term motif (Matisoff
1997), and the third, under the influence of Ong and Foley, mentioned “narrative cycle,”
the metonymic connection of an individual telling to the narrative cycle through motifs,
“similar but not identical retellings . . . operat[ing] within the immanent narrative cycle”
(Oyler 1997). In addition, Eric Rutledge has apprenticed with a biwa hōshi (“lute priest,”
a performer, usually blind, of narratives chanted to the accompaniment of a lute) and
determined that the types of errors found in manuscripts and on the basis of which
families of genealogies of manuscripts have been determined are very much the sort of
errors committed by performers both in practice and in performance, an indication that
“phrases were at one time units of recitational composition that performers could choose
among, like the formulas described by Milman Parry and Albert Lord” (1993:344).
316
S. A. THORNTON
Tradition, Structure, and Meaning in the Kōnodai senki
Although Kōnodai is a literary text composed by consulting an
original version and perhaps documents and other accounts as well,
Kōnodai’s meaning is created not solely by and within itself but also by its
invocation of the tradition of the epic by means of narrative strategies that
are usually associated with oral composition.22 John M. Foley terms this
process “traditional referentiality” (1991:8-9):
Traditional referentiality, then, entails the invoking of a context that is
enormously larger and more echoic than the text or work itself, that brings
the lifeblood of generations of poems and performances to the individual
performance or text. Each element in the phraseology or narrative
thematics stands not simply for that singular instance but for the plurality
and multiformity that are beyond the reach of textualization. From the
perspective of traditional context, these elements are foci for meaning, still
points in the exchange of meaning between an always impinging tradition
and the momentary and nominal fossilization of a text or version. Even
when the process becomes one of making oral-derived texts, the traditional
phraseology and narrative patterns continue to provide ways for the poet to
convey meaning, to tap the traditional reservoir. Poets do not persist in
employing traditional structures after the advent of literacy and texts out of
a misplaced antiquarianism or by default, but because, even in an
increasingly textual environment, the “how” developed over the ages still
holds the key to worlds of meaning that are otherwise inaccessible.
Such a process of generating meaning I call metonymy, designating a
mode of signification wherein the part stands for the whole. It is this aspect
of traditional art that may be understood as “conventional,” as long as one
realizes that in this case the convention allows for much more than a preset,
one-to-one allusiveness; in this case we are speaking about a situation in
which a text or version is enriched by an unspoken context that dwarfs the
textual artifact, in which the experience is filled out—and made
traditional—by what the conventionality attracts to itself from that context.
The phrase or scene or tale as a whole commands its meaning by
synecdoche.
22
These strategies have recently been addressed in studies of the use of models in
writing Japanese sacred biographies or hagiographies. In short, there is one model, the
life of the Buddha, to tell the story of famous Japanese Buddhist saints and famous
priests. James Foard finds useful the concept “prefiguration” (1992:86-92) and Shimizu
Yoshiaki that of “commemoration” (1992:206-7). An approach similar to theirs was
taken by William LaFleur (1976) in an earlier study of the life of the twelfth-century
poet-monk Saigyō.
JAPANESE TRADITIONAL NARRATIVE
317
This definition of “traditional referentiality” is critical to understanding how
the Kōnodai works as a narrative. Kōnodai is an oral-derived text, a literary
text that employs “traditional structures” of oral narratives to bring into play
a full range of other similar texts, that is, other versions of this one text or
other representatives of the genre.23 The connection between the Kōnodai
and the other texts comprising the genre is a shared range of patterns of
diction and narrative that indeed defines the tradition. This dynamic is
extremely crucial to the Kōnodai because, even though such a short text, it is
able through these patterns to invoke that much larger context of the
tradition.
Oral narrative is characterized by thematic composition and formulaic
23
Composition may be technically “literary” (composition is not accomplished
during performance [Lord 1960:5]) but transmission and reception are still very much
“oral.” This was true especially for the sixteenth-century warriors for whom the Kōnodai
was most likely composed, most of whom were barely literate (able to read only Japanese
syllabary if anything at all) and thus would have experienced the Kōnodai and all other
epic cycles as public, recited performances. Strategies used in the Japanese epic are also
used in many if not most genres of Japanese narrative, oral and literary, and in poetry as
well. Further, strategies of oral composition persisted (and in some contexts dominated)
in Japanese literature until well into the pre-modern period.
For example, Kabuki, the popular stage of the seventeenth through nineteenth
centuries, has provided the best-known examples. Plays were made up of type scenes
that included, among others, the battle scene (shuraba), sex scene (nureba), torture scene
(semeba), and the hero-in-disguise-reveals-himself scene (jitsu wa). Distinctive motifs or
type scenes were identified with the narratives of specific, well-known historical figures
(Brandon 1975:5, 9, 11, 14). By using specific motifs or type scenes, a playwright could
cross narratives; techniques included mitate (matching past and present), yatsushi (the
hero in disguise) and jitsu wa (the hero revealed in his true guise). By means of these
techniques, Kabuki playwrights were able to evade government censors by setting the
early eighteenth-century forty-seven rōnin incident under the cover of the fourteenthcentury Enya Hangan-Kō Moronao confrontation or to set the twelfth-century Soga
revenge story in the period of the late seventeenth- or early eighteenth-century through
the theme of the poor man versus rich man rivalry over a courtesan. Although Kabuki
offers the best-known examples, this traditional narrative strategy was articulated early in
the fifteenth century by the nō playwright and theorist Zeami, who stated, “There is also
the category of ‘created nō’ in which a new play is prepared . . . making use of the
affinities between famous places or historical sites” (Sekine 1985:99, citing Zeami
1974:30). Thus, the Kōnodai, like other “oral-derived texts,” with its very mixed
provenance in oral and literary composition practices shared with a broad variety of
Japanese narratives over a very long period of time, can properly be said to be based on
traditional narrative strategies.
318
S. A. THORNTON
diction. Narratives consist of themes or type scenes.24 In gunki monogatari,
as we shall see, we can expect a narrative composed of the background,
battle, and aftermath sections (Kajiwara 1970:41). The aftermath section, for
example, contains any number of themes: religious-awakening, taking-thetonsure, and entering-religious-life stories featuring battle survivors or
servants and female connections of the slain.
The themes are described conventionally in formulaic diction, which
varies greatly depending on the tradition. In the Japanese epic, the diction is
much looser than, say, in the Odyssey.25 We expect the diction of the
Kōnodai to be that of traditional Japanese oral narrative, called kōshō
bungaku (oral literature) or kuden bungei (orally transmitted [narrative]
arts). The process of composition and transmission in performance as
described by Parry and Lord and the subsequent elaborations identified as
oral theory or oral-formulaic theory are called kuchigatari in Japan.26
Yamamoto describes oral composition, as evidenced by his analysis of
recordings of the religious balladry of blind female performers called goze,
as characterized by a basic meter of seven and five syllables, a high
incidence of formulas in meter, and free substitution of formulas having the
same meter and the same meaning or the same function (1977).
The diction of Kōnodai is a bit different. One characteristic is its high
density of a limited number of verbal forms, whose overall impression is one
of maddening repetitiveness. The verbs are almost exclusively in additive
form, which in itself is not unique to Japanese prose or speech patterns.
Almost all the verbs or verbals (having adjectival functions but inflected as
verbs) that are not attributive (in dependent clauses) are inflected in one of
six ways. Two forms are used the most often. The fifth uses the conjunctive
24
The type scene “may be regarded as a recurrent block of narrative with an
identifiable structure, such as a sacrifice, the reception of a guest, the launching and
beaching of a ship, the donning of armor” (Edwards 1992:286). Some, like Edwards,
distinguish between type scene and theme; others do not (1992:285-87 for a review). See
also Foley 1990:331-35.
25
Work by Yamamoto Kichizō on recorded goze (blind, female, semi-religious
entertainers) ballads was the first serious attempt, as far as I can tell, to analyze formulaic
diction in the Japanese oral tradition (Yamamoto 1977).
26
For the theories behind Japanese oral composition and their history, from
Yanagita Kunio’s 1932 kuden bungei (la littérature orale, from Paul Sébillot) to
Yamamoto Kichizō’s translation of Parry’s “oral composition” as kuchigatari, see
Yamamoto 1976:97-100. For the application of Yamamoto’s Parry/Lord-based studies of
oral composition by Heike scholars, see Yamashita 1994:45-47.
JAPANESE TRADITIONAL NARRATIVE
319
particle -ba to indicate that one action follows another in time or by reason
or cause:
Moto yori kano shōgun wa / yumiya o konomase tamaeba / Bōshū
Kazusa ryōgoku no gunpyō o ugokashi. . . . (19-21)
As well you know, as for that general / he was fond of waging war and
because he was / he mustered the soldiers of the provinces of both Bōshū
and Kazusa and. . . .
The sixth is with the conjunctive form -te of the inflected particle -tsu, which
indicates completed action (rather like the ablative absolute in Latin):
On-kyōdai no on-naka fuwa ni narase tamaite / Michinoku goikken to zo
kikoekeru. (8-9)
Relations between the brothers becoming strained / he went [north] to
Michinoku, so it is rumored.
These forms are of course found quite regularly in texts such as the
Kaku’ichi Heike monogatari. In the Kōnodai, however, -ba and -te forms
are used with numbing frequency. If any feature of diction suggests oral
composition, it is this one; furthermore, it may be partially responsible for
the low value placed on Kōnodai by earlier scholars. Even so, Yamamoto
does not emphasize this feature as an indication of oral provenance.
The use of meter hardly approaches that of the goze ballads.
Nevertheless, there are other features suggesting oral composition. The
limited use of verbal inflections is complemented by a high rate of repetition
of formulas and formulaic systems: “this is the gist of what [ ] thought/said,”
“a resident of [ ] Province,” “high [ranking] and low,” “soak [ ] sleeves,”
“there was not a person who did not praise [it],” “facing west,” “press hands
together,” “said the invocation of Amida’s name,” “raise [face] to heaven
and cast [hands] down on the ground,” “realm of the hell of fighting Asuras,”
“pray for becoming a buddha,” “most moving,” and so on. Some are
repeated within the text; some are part of a greater body of formulas shared
with other texts, including the Heike. Finally, there is very little
enjambement. Diction is, however, easy to imitate: the appearance of such
elements in a text does not prove an oral provenance, but suggests rather that
the composer was skilled in the use of traditional techniques of oral
composition.
Finally, in the quotation above, Foley makes the fine distinction
between texts that share traditional narrative strategies (formulas, formulaic
320
S. A. THORNTON
systems, and type scenes, and so on) constituting the particular idiom or
register of oral narrative versus the intentional invocation of a particular
narrative through the same techniques: “preset, one-to-one allusiveness.”
According to Ziva Ben-Porat, “literary allusion is a device for the
simultaneous activation of two texts . . . achieved through the manipulation
of a special signal: a sign (simple or complex) in a given text characterized
by an additional larger ‘referent[,]’ [which] is always an independent text”
(1976:107-8, cited in Kamens 1997:6). This begs a question of the Kōnodai:
is the composition of the account of the battle as a gunki monogatari a
deliberate invocation or “activation” of all other gunki monogatari or of one
in particular, perhaps the single most representative example of the genre, the
Kaku’ichi variant of the Heike monogatari?
The Heike monogatari as the “Always Impinging Tradition”
The Heike monogatari is the tale of the rise of the Taira house under
Taira Kiyomori (1118-81), who rose to become Prime Minister and
grandfather of an emperor, and their complete destruction at the hands of the
Minamoto in 1185. The reasons for its preeminence are as much political as
aesthetic. The Kaku’ichi variant of the Heike monogatari was the monopoly
of one guild (called the Tōdō) of epic singers (biwa hōshi, or “lute priests”),
blind minstrels who accompanied themselves on a lute called the biwa. This
guild claimed Kaku’ichi (active 1340-71) as its founder, and control of the
text he produced secured control over the organization of the guild.
Kaku’ichi had prohibited anyone but the head of the guild to make a copy or
even to show a copy to anyone outside the guild. Even so, in order to obtain
recognition of the Tōdō’s independence from its original guild, in 1399 a
copy of the authorized text was presented to the third Ashikaga shogun
Yoshimitsu (1358-1408; r. 1367-95;27 Hyōdō 1993:62-63). Thus the right to
control the guild passed to the Ashikaga and the performance of the Heike
became part of the official ceremonies of the shogunal court: if the custom of
the later Tokugawa shogunate was based on precedent as claimed, the head of
the guild apparently performed the Heike before each new Ashikaga shogun
at his promotion to office and at his funeral (Hyōdō 1997:1-2).28
27
Early abdication was practiced in the imperial and shogunal courts in order to
secure the succession.
28
Hyōdō assumes that this custom of the shoguns of the Tokugawa period had its
precedent in the relationship between the guild and the Ashikaga shoguns.
JAPANESE TRADITIONAL NARRATIVE
321
Ashikaga interest in the Heike was based on the shogun’s position and
function as head of the entire Minamoto clan (uji no chōja), transferred to
Ashikaga Yoshimitsu in 1483 (Hyōdō 1993:64-65). First, heads of clans, as
winners of battles, had pacification rituals performed for the angry spirits of
their defeated and dead enemies; Ashikaga Takauji (1305-58; r. 1336-), for
example, built the temple Tenryu≠ji in Kyoto to console the spirit of the
emperor he had deposed. Thus, as chief of the Minamoto, Ashikaga
Yoshimitsu then took over the management of the Kaku’ichi Heike as a
performance meant to pacify the angry spirits of the Taira family, destroyed
by the Minamoto two hundred years before (Hyōdō 1993:65, 77).
Second, the Heike provided the myth legitimating Ashikaga power.
The Heike describes the fall of the warrior family, the Taira, also called the
Heike, which had effectively taken over the imperial family and control of
the country between 1159 and 1180, when civil war broke out. They were
destroyed in 1185 by the Minamoto clan, also called the Genji, who
established the first shogunate with headquarters in the town of Kamakura
(Kamakura Period, 1192-1333). Thus, the Kaku’ichi Heike, completed after
the fall of the Kamakura shogunate and written under its influence, is a tale
of the transition of warrior leadership from the Taira to the Minamoto.
Because of succession problems, leadership quickly passed to the family of
the first shogun’s wife, the Hōjō, who were Heike descendants. (As shikken,
head of one of the shogunate’s administrative boards, they acted as regents
for a series of shoguns during their minority.) The Ashikaga, descendants of
the Minamoto or Genji clan, brought down the Hōjō in 1333 and established
a new shogunate in 1336. The Taiheiki (by 1374), composed under the
influence of the Heike during the period of Ashikaga consolidation of power,
tells the story of the rise of the Ashikaga in terms of the Heike’s theme of
transition from Taira to Minamoto (Hyōdō 1997:4).
This theme of transition provided the Ashikaga with an effective
rallying cry in mobilizing Minamoto forces against the Hōjō as Taira. The
alternation between Minamoto and Taira would model later political actions:
Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542-1616), founder of the third and last warrior
government, had a Minamoto genealogy concocted for himself; he also
frequently had the Taiheiki read to him about the time he received the
appointment of shogun (1603) and, following the precedent of the Ashikaga,
took over the patronage of the Tōdō guild of biwa hōshi (Tōdō daikiroku, in
Atsumi et al. 1984:16-17).
The Heike monogatari, then, functioned to legitimate the victory of
the Minamoto and their descendants through the narrative theme of
“alternation between Heike and Genji,” in this case “the transition from
322
S. A. THORNTON
Heike to Genji.”29 As the version officially authorized by the Ashikaga
shogunate, it was the dominant if not the exclusive version and the one most
likely to be heard in warrior circles.
Dissemination was intensified in the years following the O±nin War of
1467-77: the weakening of the shogunate resulted in a weakening of control
over the guild. Many copies, including abbreviated versions, of the
authorized text were made, sold, and then used as scripts by the new forms of
popular entertainment that sprang up during the sixteenth century.30
Alongside the biwa hōshi there developed in the fourteenth century the
“tale priest” (monogatari sō; Ishii et al. 1990:104-5; Yoshida 1959). Some
were sighted laymen, even physicians, who read texts out loud to members
of the warrior class, or biwa hōshi not in the guilds. Since they could not
perform stories monopolized by the guilds (Butler 1967:259), many
apparently composed as well.31 They are documented not only in
contemporary diaries but also in epics, as was one in the train of the
Governor of Shinano in the Ōtō monogatari (Tale of [the Battle of] Ōtō). In
the sixteenth century, such professional reader/performers served in the
entourages (otogishū or dōbōsū) of great warlords along with the art
appraisers, musicians, and tea instructors (Ishii et al. 1990:120-21). Such a
reader/performer in the service of the Ise Hōjō may well have composed the
Kōnodai senki.
The Hōjō and the Warrior Ideology of Legitimate Rule in the Sixteenth
Century
The Ise Hōjō would have been very interested in the ideology of the
theme of the “alternation between Heike and Genji.” The Hōjō “dynastic
29
Along with the Hōgen monogatari, Heiji monogatari, and Jōkyū ki, the Heike
charts the alternation of power between the two clans. The last concerns the revolt in
1221 against the Minamoto warrior government, which was actually headed by the Hōjō
(Taira descendants) by then.
30
This discussion is based on a chart, “The History of the Tōdō Guild,” provided
by Hyōdō as part of his presentation at the 1997 Cornell symposium on the Heike (Hyōdō
1997).
31
This fact begs the question whether the overwhelming dominance of the Heike
cycle, especially of the Kaku’ichi version, not only forced performers outside the guilds
to compose narratives of their own but also forced them to compose as much as possible
in the style of the Heike.
JAPANESE TRADITIONAL NARRATIVE
323
philosophy was to establish a Kanto [sic] state ruled by scions of the Taira
surpassing in martial virtues even the Minamoto clan in its prime and,
certainly, the then declining Ashikaga shoguns, who were descendants of the
Minamoto. The age believed that Minamoto and Taira ascendancy went by
turns and the Odawara Hōjō perceived a parallel between the vindication of
the Taira name achieved by the shikken and their own ‘Taira’ rule over the
Kanto [sic]” (Steenstrup 1974:285).32 The identification of the Ise Hōjō with
the original Hōjō was encouraged at many levels: the founder of the family,
Hōjō Sōun (Ise Nagauji) read the Taiheiki and the Azuma kagami (Mirror of
the Eastern Provinces) to learn all he could about the original Hōjō, and
high-ranking vassals were required to wear the court dress of the Kamakura
period. Thus, in the Kōnodai, as in real life, the Ise or Odawara Hōjō
justified their ascendancy over the Ashikaga in the Kantō with the theme of
“alternation between Heike and Genji” of the medieval epics.
To justify the transition from the Ashikaga Minamoto to the Taira Ise
Hōjō, Kōnodai praises the Hōjō and criticizes Ashikaga Yoshiaki in terms of
Confucian ideals. In the sixteenth century, Japan underwent massive
changes as it devolved into some two hundred or more independent domains.
The last vestiges of the old institutions under which the country had been
unified had broken down completely: the imperial court and its bureaucracy,
the vassal system under the Ashikaga shogunate, and even the old great
temple and shrine complexes. Systems of organization based on family,
temple affiliation, or government service gave way to those based on
geographical proximity. Land tenure systems changed, as did taxation
systems, and the basis of legitimate rule. The right to rule was based on
success in warfare (the ability to protect and to expand the state) and on
efficient administration; this system was derived from the Confucian idea of
the conditional right to rule known in the West as the Mandate of Heaven.
This concept was best articulated by Oda Nobunaga (1534-82), the first of
Japan’s three unifiers, who claimed as the source of his authority to rule
nothing less than the victories in battle granted by heaven. Whatever
background a warlord’s family might have—descent from emperors or
centuries of service in either the imperial bureaucracy or shogunal vassal
system—a warlord looked to no other right to rule than his continued success
and competence. On this basis, warlords experimented with forms of
taxation, land tenure, and even recruitment and promotion on the basis of
merit: the models for these experiments came from the Chinese classics.
32
The shikken was the regent for the shogun of the Kamakura period, a position
held by the main line of the Hōjō family.
324
S. A. THORNTON
Indeed, the sixteenth century begins the replacement of Buddhism by
Confucianism as the dominant ideology in Japan.33 Confucian learning was
on the whole the preserve of certain aristocratic families and of the Zen
school of Buddhism. For example, long before the outbreak of the Ōnin
War, Ise Nagauji, founder of the Ise Hōjō dynasty, had studied the Chinese
classics at Daitokuji, head temple of a branch of the Zen Rinzai school of
Buddhism (Steenstrup 1974:284). It is a commonplace that modern
Confucianism in Japan began with Fujiwara Seika (1561-1619), who was the
first, under the patronage of Tokugawa Ieyasu, to abandon his status as a
Buddhist monk and establish a school of Confucianism separate from
Buddhist institutions. However, one did not necessarily have to be an
aristocrat or a Buddhist monk to study Confucianism: in the town of
Ashikaga, the home territory of the Ashikaga family, at least, was the
Ashikaga Gakkō (Ashikaga school), a secular institution substantially
revived and endowed in 1439 by the Kamakura Deputy Uesugi Norizane (d.
1455). Staffed by Zen monks, at its height it trained about three thousand
students, including monks, and was the foremost school of Chinese learning
throughout the sixteenth century. One can only imagine the number of
laymen and monks from this institution who entered the service of warlords
throughout the century to advise on law, taxation, and strategy. Certainly,
the availability of such advisers is evidenced in the successful restructuring
of domains, such as that of the Hōjō and the Takeda, many of whose reforms
were adopted by the last Tokugawa warrior government. Many of those
reforms are seen in the household codes of warlords of the period. They
range from an odd assortment of maxims of the “early to bed, early to rise”
variety, like that of Ise Nagauji (Steenstrup 1974), to strict regulation of
vassals and their land, as with that of the Takeda (Röhl 1959).
In an age in which vassals frequently overthrew their overlords, the
Confucian values of loyalty and filial piety were appreciated and
promulgated. This tendency is seen in the famous and widely studied
Imagawa Letter of Imagawa Sadayo Ryōshun (d. 1429) to his brother and
adopted son, written to admonish him for his bad administration and conduct
(Steenstrup 1973). Because of Ise Nagauji’s relationship with the Imagawa
(his sister was the mother of Imagawa Ujichika [1470?-1526; Streenstrup
33
Confucianism can be described in brief as the ideology of the perpetuation of
the state and the family, government by a virtuous ruler assisted by ministers chosen for
their education and merit, and the personal development of social values in accordance
with the principles of nature. At its best, Confucianism meant the education of humane
men to administer a draconian legal system. At its worst, it justified the abuse of
subordinates and children on the basis of the ultimate value of loyalty and filial piety.
JAPANESE TRADITIONAL NARRATIVE
325
1974:284) and years of service to the domain, it was no doubt an important
text for the Hōjō, too. In it we can recognize many of the same Confucian
themes pursued in the Kōnodai in complaints against Ashikaga Yoshiaki:
putting private benefits before moral law (tendō, “the way of heaven”), razing
family shrines, showing a lack of respect to parents, disregarding the advice
of wise and loyal vassals, and so on. The letter also warns of the dire
repercussions of the failure to understand the basic Buddhist principle of the
consequences of actions (personified indeed by Taira Kiyomori in the
Kaku’ichi Heike), what Steenstrup translates as “not understanding that pride
goes before a fall” (1974:305).
The virtue of filial piety figures prominently in the Kōnodai. In the
background section, Yoshiaki’s deepest thoughts (25-27) are compared with
Ujitsuna’s (30-46): not only is the number of lines considerably in Ujitsuna’s
favor, but so is the comparison. Yoshiaki is contesting power with his father
and elder brother; he wins one battle and thinks he can conquer the Kantō. In
contrast, Ujitsuna’s goals are the filial (Confucian) completion of his father’s
dream, to be accomplished only through thought and planning (19-48):
As well you know, as for that general / he was fond of waging war and
because he was / he mustered the soldiers of the provinces of both Bōshu≠
and Kazusa and / he subjugated Takagi [Governor of] Echizen father and
son, children (vassals) of Hara no Jirō’s house and / driving out the
Governor of Shimotsuke and his son, [of the] same [family] / immediately
afterward attacking and killing Hara no Jirō / deep in his heart this is the
gist of what he thought: / “There is no one waging war to rival me. /
Surely, there is no doubt that I shall become general of the Kantō,” he
thought, however / at this time, [one] calling himself Hōjō Shinkurō
Ujitsuna / was become [a man] of his times waging war. / Deep in his
heart this is the gist of what Ujitsuna thought: / “Indeed the one who was
my father invaded the Kantō and / he raised his flag over [the province of]
Sōshu≠ and / to himself this is what he said: / ‘Someday I shall conquer the
Kantō and while recommending [my son] Kurō for office [at the imperial
court], / I shall build a palace in Kamakura, and this is what I want,’ this
he declared./ Now it becoming my generation / I shall conquer the
province of Musashi and / in knowing that I shall soon have the Kantō in
my hand / what chagrin to fear Yoshiaki’s might. / Thus even in the words
of the ancients / ‘The inchworm shrinks / in order to extend [himself]’—
now is the time to pay attention [to these words] / debasing myself and
drawing near to that prince / awaiting the winds of opportunity, destroying
him / after that, I shall extend my power over the eight provinces [of the
Kantō], that is certain. / First, I [must] pull strings,” so saying / preparing
gold, silver, and jewels / he sent messengers one after the other and
although he expressed his earnest desire, it was of no
326
S. A. THORNTON
use.
Success also depends on consultation with vassals and respecting their
advice. Ujitsuna’s chief strategist Kinkokusai stresses the difference
between Ujitsuna and Yoshiaki (103-12):
“As for what is called the council of this house / lord and vassals having
come to a consensus / we consult the omens and when we do / together with
the strategy there is no failure. / As for what is called waging war of the
Prince’s side / having made their wills one with the prince’s [having
submitted to the prince’s will] / they do not even have a conference and
since they do not / the wills of lord and vassal are [only finally] reconciled /
and because they are / they are a little inferior and because they are / they
may not be able to rectify their [way of] waging war [and their army can
never match ours]. . . .”
Ujitsuna consults his vassals and they come to a consensus on strategy and
tactics; Yoshiaki’s vassals are forced to submit to his will. Indeed, when the
size of Ujitsuna’s attacking force is reported and a plea made for a sudden
charge to drive back those who had just crossed the river, Yoshiaki,
according to Ujitsuna “a warrior of reckless valor” (143), orders his men to
advance at a stately pace and, in effect, to impress the enemy with their
grandness as the tactic for forcing them back (174-204). His army spends a
good hour exchanging verbal challenges and then volleys of arrows (212-20),
which gives Ujitsuna time to surround them in a pincer movement as planned
(222-24).
In an age when the recruitment and consolidation of relations with
vassals depended greatly upon a warlord’s ability to reward them by
expanding the domain, success in warfare was of paramount importance. In
the Kōnodai, the values of military leadership and strategy are stressed.
Success depends first and foremost on proper reverence of the gods. As Ise
Nagauji had proclaimed, “First of all, you shall believe in the Buddha(s) and
the Gods” (Steenstrup 1974:289). Ujitsuna speaks at length on this (128-41):
“Well now, I invaded the Kantō and put it into confusion and / for more
than thirty years I have preserved my rule. / This our country is the land of
the gods. / As for the gods they do not receive negligence of worship and /
surely they will reciprocate with their intercession. / Moreover, according
to certain sacred texts / nothing is achieved without the aid of the gods. /
Depending on how one shows respect, [the gods] increase one’s power, so
I heard and when I did / even though [Hachiman] is the tutelary deity of
the Minamoto / I worshipped him most importantly at [the shrines in] Izu,
JAPANESE TRADITIONAL NARRATIVE
327
Hakone, and Mishima and / I even restored Wakanomiya [Shrine] and / I
worshipped praying for [success in] waging war and / as for the gods, they
lodge in the mind of an honest man and because they do / how could there
be no sign in today’s battle?”
The gods must be worshipped and revered and the shrine of the tutelary god
of the Minamoto, founders of the shogunate, rebuilt. This detail is an
allusion to an appalling act of sacrilege: the Hōjō ki (Chronicle of the Hōjō)
and the Sōshu≠ hyōran ki (Chronicle of the Military Disturbances in Sagami
Province) relate that, under Yoshiaki’s orders, in 1526 Satomi Yoshihiro
(confused with his father Yoshitaka) invaded Kamakura, in the Hōjō
domain, with his navy and rampaged through the shrines, including the
Tsurugaoka Hachiman Shrine (Hanawa 1979a:444-45; 1977c:562). It
enshrined the tutelary deity of the Minamoto, founders of the shogunal
system, as well as the Ashikaga and Satomi, descendants of the Minamoto.
It was Ujitsuna who rebuilt it and signaled thereby his claim to the position
of leadership in the Kantō (Hanawa 1979a:453-54; 1977c:568-69). Not only
does the Hōjō ki chastise Yoshiaki for the abuse of his own tutelary deity,
but he also states, “Our country is the land of the gods” (“Waga chō wa
shinkoku nari”). Reverence for the gods is of primary importance, and the
Kōnodai senki chimes in with its own declaration, “This our country is the
land of the gods” (“Sore waga chō wa shinkoku nari”; 130). This concept
had become an important strain of the ideology of the military class ever
since Japan’s rescue by typhoons from two Mongol invasions in the
thirteenth century. In addition, the gods are the source of legitimacy, and in
this case legitimate control over the Kantō is at stake. Yoshiaki’s ghost tells
his nurse Rensei, “because of these mistakes / the gods and the buddhas may
well have deserted him” (573-74).
This theme is important in the Heike cycle because it is the burning by
the Heike (Taira house) armies of important temple complexes, especially
that of the Tōdaiji in Nara, the centerpiece of a network of temples
throughout Japan dedicated to the preservation of the imperium and the
imperial family, that led to the death of their leader Taira Kiyomori and the
ultimate defeat of the clan. Even the accidental burning of the temple
Zenkōji in Nagano Province was seen to portend the fall of the Taira (2.13
[burning of Zenkōji]; 5.14 [burning of Tōdaiji]; and 7.7 [burning in hell of
Taira Kiyomori]).
More importantly, it is the theme of the veneration and protection of
the shrine of the Minamoto tutelary deity that places the Kōnodai in the
cycle of epics concerning the “alternation between Heike and Genji.” While
the Heike celebrates the transition to the Minamoto, the Kōnodai justifies the
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transition to the Ise Hōjō: the Minamoto have again (as in 1159, described in
the Heiji monogatari) caused a major disturbance. Damage caused to the
shrine by the Satomi under Ashikaga Yoshiaki’s orders has been repaired by
the Hōjō. Like the Hōjō of the Kamakura shogunate, the Ise Hōjō have had
to replace the Minamoto in leadership because of the trouble they caused;
the Hōjō are the proper caretakers of the Minamoto project. The Hōjō are
indeed better Minamoto than the Minamoto themselves. Kōnodai reinforces
this claim by ignoring, for the most part, Yoshiaki’s brother Ashikaga
Takamoto, the Prince of Koga, in whose name the Hōjō actually fought and
defeated Yoshiaki.
Ujitsuna is a model of the good ruler described in the Chinese
classics. The irony is that the direct condemnation of Yoshiaki as a leader is
made by the ghost of his son, who died with him in battle: refusal to consult
the gods (lack of reverence), bypassing the main Ashikaga house for private
gain (lack of filial piety) and ingratitude to vassals.34 Arrogance, then, is
equivalent to bad leadership; bad leadership results in defeat in battle and the
loss of rule. Even Yoshiaki’s vassals who suffer and die because of him are
presented as better than he because they exemplify the Confucian value of
loyalty. His loyal vassal Henmi, Governor of Yamashiro, before killing
himself, persuades others not to join him in death but to flee with Yoshiaki’s
younger son to save the house by citing a Jin dynasty strategist of the
Warring States period (403-221 BCE): “‘Seeing the fall of the old king / be
loyal to the new,’ so saying / Kōsekikō left [these words to us].” (379-81).
Yoshiaki’s loyal concubine Aisu no kimi commits suicide.
What is distinctive about Kōnodai is the degree to which the arrogant
lord Ashikaga Yoshiaki is compared with the good lord Hōjō Ujitsuna.
Rarely in the epic is the victor given such a prominent role. What may not
be obvious is that the comparison offers an opportunity to state principles of
leadership and to legitimate transfer of authority on that basis. However,
while the success of the Hōjō is defined in terms of the political values and
texts associated with Confucianism, the destruction of Ashikaga Yoshiaki is
given an added dimension.
34
In the seventeenth-century Hōjō ki (Chronicle of the Hōjō) this same analysis is
given by the Hōjō strategist, Ōfuji Kinkokusai, and the diction is very close, if not exactly
the same (Hanawa 1979a:449).
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329
Traditional Narrative Strategies: The Buddhist Sermon
While the Kōnodai justifies the victory of the Hōjō by invoking an
important theme in epic, “alternation between Heike and Genji,” the defeat
of Ashikaga Yoshiaki is explained by another theme of the epic, especially
of the Kaku’ichi Heike—the Buddhist concept of decay. The author of the
Kōnodai senki invokes this concept especially by use of certain patterns of
narrative, specifically religious narratives so formulaic in nature that they
might be considered “type scenes.” As mentioned above, this religious
material, the so-called sermon aspect of battle narratives, is identified as
crucial to the definition of the Japanese epic as a narrative genre. Religious
narratives are by no means exclusive to the epic; nevertheless, their use in
the epic is one of the characteristics distinguishing them from other genres
of battle narrative.
In the Kaku’ichi Tale of the Heike and others one can find different
kinds of religious material. The first is the motif of invoking the name of
Amida Buddha who presides over the Pure Land paradise in the West, the
nembutsu motif. The nembutsu is chanted in times of danger or in
anticipation of death. For example, in the story of Giō, the dancer replaced
by another in the affections of a powerful man, three women in a remote
cottage hear a knock at the door at midnight and, anticipating the worst,
chant the nembutsu before opening it (1.6).35 The nembutsu is often chanted
as the warrior faces death on the battlefield.36 In the sixteenth century, the
ten chantings of the nembutsu by a warrior were so strongly entrenched as a
traditional convention of the genre that one epic has a warrior, a follower of
Nichiren (1222-82), himself founder of a school of Buddhism violently
opposed to the practice of chanting the nembutsu, chanting the invocation of
the title of the Lotus Sutra (daimoku) ten times before death (Hanawa
1940a:36).
The second kind of religious material is the sermon. In the Heike, for
example, the great Pure Land sectarian founder Hōnen (1133-1212) prepares
35
The first number is the book number, the second the chapter number. Since the
Japanese and English versions of the standard Kaku’ichi version are arranged identically,
only the book and chapter numbers will be given. The standard Japanese edition is
Takagi I. et al. 1959-60; for a serviceable if imperfect English translation, see Kitagawa
1975; others prefer McCullough 1988.
36
The Heike monogatari, 4.12, describing the death of Minamoto Yorimasa or
9.14, describing the death of Tadanori. See also 9.19, 10.5, 10.10-12, 11.9, 11.18, and
Epilogue.5 describing executions and other deaths.
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S. A. THORNTON
Taira Shigehira for death with a sermon on Pure Land teachings (10.5).
Sometimes the sermon is indicated in the rhetoric of a descriptive passage.
In the Tale of [the Battle of] Ōtō, for example, in describing the battlefield
after a slaughter, the narrator exclaims, “Those who have heard what people
have seen and heard and have not at this time awakened to religion, [just]
what time are they waiting for?” (Hanawa 1977b:371). There are no
Buddhist sermons in the Kōnodai; there are, however, a lecture on good
strategy and an oracle from the dead on bad leadership (see below), which
have the same function in helping to establish the ideological framework of
the text.
The third kind of religious material comprises the story of religious
awakening (hosshin-mono), usually that of a warrior, and the story of
entering religious life (shukke-mono), usually that of a woman. The best
known of all hosshin-mono is the story of Atsumori, a young member of the
Taira family killed in combat. However, the story is not about Atsumori, but
about his slayer, Kumagai Naozane, who later became a famous nembutsu
(priest). Killing Atsumori first opened his eyes to the reality of his life and
led to a rejection of it (9.6). The best known examples of stories of entering
religious life are the stories of the empress Kenreimon’in (Heike,
“Epilogue”), the woman warrior Tomoe (Mizuhara 1937), and Tora (of the
Soga monogatari [Tale of the Soga]; Fukuda 1981:54-60), who put on black
and devoted their lives to praying for the souls of themselves and their dead.
In the Kōnodai, the nurse of Yoshiaki’s son, Rensei, becomes a nun to pray
for his soul. The nurse’s story as a story of entering religious life (tonsei- or
shukke-mono) is traditionally part of the aftermath section. However, as the
story that ends the epic, the nurse’s story has the traditional function of
ending the tale of horror and woe with a representation of a pilgrimage, a
ritual that will pacify the ghosts of the dead (592-602):
Rensei feeling she had wakened from a dream / weeping weeping departing
there / she hurried to a certain mountain temple and at the [age] of thirtyone / she shaved [her head] and / clad herself ill in [a robe of] inky black
and / while she wandered the many provinces and the seven highways / at
holy Buddhist temples / at holy Shintō shrines she made her obeisances and
/ prayed for his buddhahood, how moving it was! / How moving it was!
The young prince’s ghost acknowledges her pilgrimage to his grave, saying,
“[That having come] all the way here you pray for my afterlife / makes me
so happy” (550-51). Her efforts on his behalf are indeed welcome because,
having died in battle and slipped through the net of Amida’s compassion, he
JAPANESE TRADITIONAL NARRATIVE
331
has been condemned to the hell of “the realm of the fighting Asuras” (551,
585).
The fourth kind of religious material found in epic is the story of
Rebirth in paradise or ōjō-den. This is the story of the death of a Pure Land
believer, like Taira Kiyomori’s daughter, the former empress Kenreimon’in,
whose Rebirth in paradise is prepared by facing west, tying the hands with a
five-colored cord attached to a statue of Amida, and chanting the nembutsu.
The attainment of Rebirth in paradise is indicated by the scent of incense,
the appearance of purple clouds in the sky, the sound of music, and
sometimes a rain of flowers, all representing the coming of Amida to
welcome to paradise believers who have died calling on his name (raigo;
Epilogue.5). The closest to this theme in the Kōnodai is the description of
the suicide of Yoshiaki’s concubine, who dressed herself for death, wrote
her last poems, and, before biting off her tongue, “facing the west, she
pressed her hands together and finally in a loud voice she said the invocation
of Amida’s name” (496-97).
The fifth and last kind of religious material is the story of the origins
of an object of worship, usually a temple, the engi. Again, in the Heike, for
example, a passage is devoted to Zenkōji, the head temple in Nagano of an
Amidist cult (2.13). However, the antecedents of many people, places, and
things are described, including those of the imperial regalia, the sword and
the mirror (12.11 and 14). The Kōnodai also includes an aetiology of the
hill Kōnodai itself (62-72): it cites the legend that the famous mythical hero
Yamato Takeru had named the hill for a stork, a good omen, that had
alighted there.
Again, Japanese scholars refer to the religious material in the epic as
the “sermon” (shōdō) aspect and have long recognized the importance of this
religious material in defining the epic as a distinct genre of battle literature.
I would go further and claim that this religious material determines the very
form and function of the Japanese epic as a Buddhist sermon. The heavy
influence of the sermon in general and of Pure Land Buddhism in particular
may be due to the fact that one of the earliest stages in the Kaku’ichi Heike’s
development was produced by the Agui school of Pure Land preachers and
propagators, to which are attributed the crucial beginning and ending
chapters as well as much of the Pure Land material that appears in the text
(Sekiyama 1978:69). In the first part of the thirteenth century, the preaching
of Pure Land Buddhism was proscribed in Kyoto, and the early traditions are
thought to have been used surreptitiously to preach (Butler 1966:9).
Certainly the immediate ancestor of the founder of the Agui school,37
37
The founder was Chōken (1126-1203), seventh son of Shinzei, whose name
also appears in 1.12, 3.15, and 3.18.
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S. A. THORNTON
Fujiwara Michinori Shinzei, is featured prominently in the text (1.12, 1.13,
2.4, and 4.1), as are the Fujiwara and Taira followers of the founder of Pure
Land Buddhism as an independent school. Of those examples of medieval
battle literature that have been identified as epic, the Buddhism espoused is
predominantly (I will not say exclusively) Pure Land.
By using specific motifs and specific types of religious narratives also
incorporated into the larger narrative of the Heike, the Kōnodai can invoke
the wider Buddhist interpretation informing the Heike very economically.
The description of Yoshiaki’s concubine folding her hands in prayer, facing
west (the direction of Amida’s Pure Land paradise), and chanting the
nembutsu before committing suicide invites comparisons with other such
descriptions, particularly that of the death of Kenreimon’in in the Kaku’ichi
Heike, which is a much more fully developed version of the type scene;
indeed, the story she tells of her own life fully develops the sense of despair
consequent on losing her family in war, a despair from which only the mercy
of Amida can save her. Even if the description of the death of Yoshiaki’s
concubine is an abridged or truncated version of the type scene “story of
Rebirth in Amida’s paradise,” it is no less a “story of Rebirth in Amida’s
paradise” than Kenreimon’in’s and loses nothing in terms of its meaning in
the broader narrative of the epic precisely because, as a type scene, it
invokes the story of Kenreimon’in. The part can stand for the whole in all
its forms (metonymy) because of the operation of the contiguous
performance (anaphora): the audience, depending on experience, has heard
one or more versions, plays them simultaneously, compares and draws
meaning from the comparison (Foley 1991:9-10). Kōnodai , despite its short
length, has access to meaning that its 600-odd lines alone could not possibly
provide; even as an abridged or truncated gunki monogatari, it still has
access to the meaning inherent in the entire genre.
Buddhist Historiology in the Epic
As Buddhist sermon, the function of the epic is to interpret the
historical event, in this case the war or battle, as proof of Buddhist doctrines
of eschatology and soteriology. Therefore, the Kaku’ichi Heike explains the
downfall of the Taira in terms of the basic tenet of Buddhism—all things are
subject to change—and its elaboration in Pure Land Buddhism, as seen
above. The question is, then, how this function is merged with the historical
theme of “alternation between Heike and Genji” that explains the rise of the
JAPANESE TRADITIONAL NARRATIVE
333
Minamoto. The way that history (the narration of events) and Buddhism
(the analysis) are fused in the Heike provides the interpretive framework for
the Kōnodai senki.
The content of the epic falls into three parts (Kami 1970:73). First
comes the background, which describes the events leading up to and causing
the battle. The second part is the account of the battle itself. Here, victors
can shine through their noble exploits on the field; even so, the focus is on
the deaths of the defeated. The third and last part describes the aftermath of
the battle. In this section survivors are executed, witnesses of the battle
retreat into religious life, and the families and loved ones of the dead devote
themselves to their afterlives. Ideally, these three parts fall neatly in
succession; however, in longer works with many protagonists, the battle and
aftermath sections of their stories of each individual are included in the same
chapter. For example, in the case of the Heike, there are too many characters
and too many battles to place all the battle stories in one section and all the
aftermath stories in another. Rather, for each important character the battle
story and the aftermath story are included in the same chapter. However, the
six chapters tacked on to the end of the Heike—the story of the empress in
the aftermath of the destruction of her family—serve as a summary and
recap, and thus create the effect of the overall three-part structure of shorter
epics.
The three-part structure of the epic organizes the content as an
historical narrative. Over this structure is laid the structure of the Buddhist
sermon, itself based on the system of Buddhist logic. There are five parts.
The first is the citation of the theme derived from sacred scripture, the sutras,
or by extension, the teachings of sectarian founders. The second is the
explanation of the citation. The third is a parable that illustrates the citation.
The fourth is an example given as a proof of the teachings, and the fifth is a
summary/conclusion (Sekiyama 1978:24-25).
The Background Section of the Epic
The function of the background is to describe the events leading up to
the war or battle and to give the cause for the destruction of a great house. In
historical—or historiological—terms, the cause is the arrogance of the head
of the house.38 The theme is presented in the opening lines of the Kaku’ichi
38
For Taira Kiyomori, see Heike monogatari 1.1. Such are also the cases of
Yamana Ujikiyo in the Meitokuki, of Ogasawara Nagahide in the Ōtō, and Ashikaga
Mochiuji in the Yūki, whose actions precipitate the destructions of their families.
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S. A. THORNTON
Heike: “Yes, pride must have its fall, for it is as unsubstantial as a dream on
a spring night. The brave and violent man—he too must die away in the
end” (Kitagawa 1975:1:5); moreover, the background section describes the
arrogance of Taira Kiyomori and the suffering he causes: the suffering to the
court (in his intervention in the emperor’s love affairs and elimination of
rivals to his own daughter [6.4]), the suffering to individuals (such as the
two entertainers Giō and Hotoke), the suffering to the religious realm
(precedents in ritual broken [e.g., 1.8]), and the suffering to himself (he dies
of a fever whose heat is equal to that of hell [6.7]).
These historical events are given an interpretive framework of
Buddhism; in the opening chapter of the Heike are the first elements of the
Buddhist sermon.39 It opens with lines citing the Buddhist theme of the
narrative:
The bell of the Gion Temple tolls into every man’s heart to warn him that
all is vanity and evanescence. . . . [A]ll who flourish are destined to decay
(Kitagawa 1975:1:5).
The reference to the Gion temple bell that tolls at the death of a monk comes
from one Buddhist text, the Gion zukyō, and the reference to the sāla tree that
turned color at the death of the Buddha from another, the Nirvana sutra.
Then comes the explanation: what flowers withers, and, more importantly,
pride goeth before a fall. Next the text cites examples of traitors from the
pasts of China and Japan and then focuses on an example from the recent
past, Taira Kiyomori. The entire Tale of the Heike is the story of Taira
Kiyomori and the destruction of the Taira house exacted in retribution
(Epilogue.5). As set up by the first chapter, the rest of the Heike functions as
parable and proof of Buddhist doctrine. The Heike is in fact a very long,
serialized sermon.
Similarly, the background section of the Kōnodai explains the events
leading up to the battle (lines 1-56): Yoshiaki’s ancestry, his sojourn in the
far north, his return to take Oyumi, his ambition to take the Kantō, and the
similar ambitions of his rival Hōjō Ujitsuna. This section includes
traditional type scenes of “the warrior declaring his name” (399-408),
“description or armor and accouterments” (270-72), “the warrior’s faithful
horse” (312-35), and, especially, “the loyal vassal” (245-48, 346-420) and
“the arrogant lord” (107-12, 143-44, 175-204 for Yoshiaki’s incompetence
39
Not all epics set the stage with a Buddhist citation. The Taiheiki, for example,
begins with a Confucian/Taoist exposition on chaos; the Meitokuki and Ōtō monogatari
begin with Confucian references. However, the Yūki senjō monogatari and Sasago ochi
no sōshi are placed firmly if briefly in a Buddhist context in the opening lines.
JAPANESE TRADITIONAL NARRATIVE
335
in war).
It is true that in terms of its opening Kōnodai lacks both a literal
statement of Buddhist orientation and a characterization of Yoshiaki as
arrogant. Much, however, is referenced through its diction. For example, the
Kaku’ichi Heike begins by “inquiring” into the careers of arrogant leaders in
China (ichō o toburaeba), “inquiring” about the same in Japan (honchō o
ukagau ni), and, finally, “inquiring” into the ancestry of Kiyomori himself
(Sono sensō o tazunereba). Similarly, the Kōnodai begins by “considering
the year of the battle” (on-ikusa no nengō o kangauru ni) and “inquiring fully
into the background of the destruction of the noble Prince” (gosho-sama no
go-metsubō no yurai o kuwashiku tazuneru ni), which phrase leads directly
into Yoshiaki’s ancestry. This loose formulaic system based on verbs
meaning to ask or to inquire or even, by extension, to consider is employed
extensively in the introductions of popular religious narratives concerning the
origins of gods and shrines. Thus, its economical use in the Kōnodai places it
firmly by traditional association in the ranks of popular religious narrative in
general and the Buddhist epic exemplified by the Heike in particular. The
death of Ashikaga Yoshiaki in battle is understood in religious terms,
whatever other reasons might be stated explicitly in the text. In common with
other epics, it presents the theme of the destruction of a great house because
of the pride, violence, and arrogance of the head of the house. The theme of
destruction through arrogance is explicitly stated at the end of the text as
summed up by the ghost of Yoshiaki’s son in the aftermath section (557-70).
Yoshiaki’s arrogance consists of refusal to consult the gods, bypassing the
main Ashikaga house for private gain, and ingratitude to vassals (557-73):
Relate in detail to the young prince my younger brother / this time his father
the great prince / for his destruction there are three mistakes to blame and /
as for the first: although his spirits were high / his martial spirit not
consulting the omens / he did not know the fear of heaven [and] / as for the
second: he bypassed the main house and / thinking he would become master
of the eight provinces / because he thought [of this] deep in his heart / he
made the way of heaven (government) a matter of private interest and / as
for the third: Mariyatsu Jokan had served him as a follower but / not long
after [Yoshiaki] disowned him and because he did / suddenly [Jokan] died. /
His resentment becoming an evil spirit / it bore a grudge against his prince. /
Because of these mistakes / the gods and the buddhas may well have
deserted him.
In Buddhist terms, however, the real cause of the end of the Heike or
Taira house is mappō, the fourth and final age, one of religious decline, after
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S. A. THORNTON
the death of the historical Buddha, which is used to explain the degeneracy
and decline of the social and political sphere or the destruction of a temple
(2.12 [the fate of Zenkōji], 2.13 [the squabbling on Mt. Hiei], 4.9 [fate of
Miidera], 4.15 [of Kōfukuji]) and even an earthquake (12.1).40 The idea of
the breakdown of both the religious and the sociopolitical realms in the Final
Age of the Dharma is a basic tenet of Pure Land Buddhism, which proposes
that the most appropriate response to such dreadful times is belief in the
Buddha Amida and his forty-eight vows to save all Sentient Beings who think
or call on his name. In Japan, mappō was calculated as beginning in 1052
(Hori 1967:210). Taira Kiyomori is presented as a villain, of course, but
more importantly as an agent of mappō in the disorder he causes to religious,
public, and personal lives.
Mappō is not invoked by means of a one-to-one correspondence
between one particular vocabulary word and its denotated meaning. The
“narrative” of Pure Land preaching also works on the principle of metonymy.
The world is in the grip of the Final Age of the Dharma. The world is
therefore in chaos. This chaos is defined in terms of the Six Realms of
Existence (rokudō), which now penetrate each other, so that one can in a
single lifetime experience the sufferings of all Six Realms, regardless of
virtue earned in previous incarnations and the anticipated rewards of being
born in one of the first three. The only escape is the mercy of Amida
Buddha, who has vowed to cause to be reborn in his Pure Land paradise all
who call on his name, that is, who chant the nembutsu (Namu Amida
Buddha), especially at death. No one of the terms Final Age, Six Realms,
Amida, Pure Land, or nembutsu makes sense without the others. Therefore,
any one of these terms invokes the others and the meaning of the whole.
Thus, when Taira Kiyomori’s daughter Kenreimon’in describes her life in
terms of experiencing the sufferings of all Six Realms, when as an empress
and mother of an emperor she should have experienced very little suffering at
all in her life, she also invokes mappō and her father as the agent of mappō
as the direct cause of her predicament. The fact that this personal
interpretation of her life and the description of her death with full signs of
being welcomed into Amida’s Pure Land paradise come at the end of the
Kaku’ichi Heike reinforces the Pure Land interpretation of the fall of the
Taira as a consequence of mappō.
Here, Kōnodai follows the form of the Kaku’ichi Heike and other
epics. The anticipated framework—the Final Age of the Dharma (mappō),
the concomitant breakdown in public and private life, and the only salvation
40
Imperial edicts accuse Kiyomori of destroying both Buddha’s Law and the
Imperial Law (4.7, 4.8, 5.10, and 7.10).
JAPANESE TRADITIONAL NARRATIVE
337
through Amida Buddha—is provided in traditional places in the battle and
aftermath sections. After describing the death of Yoshiaki’s horse, the text
summarizes by saying, “That was the age of wisdom, this the world of the
Final Age of the Dharma (mappō) and of fools of which these are even the
proofs” (342-43). Again, in the aftermath section’s descriptions of the fate of
Yoshiaki’s ladies, the text notes with a very general allusion to Buddhist
teachings: “Until yesterday this being a place of fame and honor / they
played with the ball of fortune and / in the morning, [things] having changed,
down the road of ignoring the law of karma they retreated to their
destinations” (449-52).41
The Battle Account Section of the Epic
The second part of the epic is the account of the battle. Battle
accounts also have two interrelated functions, the historical and the religious.
First they describe the battles as they happened: who fought whom, where,
when, and how; what were the notable exploits and victories; who was
killed. Sometimes an epic will be quite exhaustive in detailing the numbers
and types of troops, their weapons, and their deployment. The Kōnodai
describes the positions of the armies, their councils, their tactics, and the
deaths of Yoshiaki, his son, his brother, and his loyal vassals (53-501).
The second function of the battle account is to describe the suffering
caused in battle to the family and vassals of the head of the house. True to
the medieval tradition, the descriptions in the epic are explicit and quite
horrific. No nice, clean shoulder wounds here. Arms and legs are lopped
off; blood soaks the grasses; and the corpses of men lie strewn together with
the carcasses of horses, as in the Ōtō (Hanawa 1977b:371). Like all epics,
and especially later epics, the Kōnodai is replete with gore. Sad are the
deaths of Yoshiaki’s brother and son who obey the family code not to
commit suicide but seek their deaths in battle (228-310), sad the fate of his
horse, Devil Moon Coat, which makes its way back to Oyumi, where,
exhausted and covered with blood, he collapses—screaming—in the garden
of the palace to the great dismay and fright of the ladies: “there was not one
person who did not soak his sleeves [with tears]” (312-45). But most
poignant is the death of Henmi, Governor of Yamashiro (“the loyal vassal”),
who committed suicide after convincing four others to retreat and escape
41
For a discussion of the role of mappō thought in Japanese historical tales and
medieval epic, see Brown 1979:370-401.
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S. A. THORNTON
from Oyumi with Yoshiaki’s younger son in the hope of reviving the house
in the future (394-420):
Thus the Governor of Yamashiro drew a fan from his waist and / he
beckoned the side of the enemy / a vassal serving lord Hōjō / Yamanaka
Shūrinosuke (Assistant Director in the Office of Palace Repairs) as soon as
he saw this sight / two or three hundred horsemen had come hurrying up [to
him]. / “Yamanaka am I and who might you be? / Declare your name,” so
saying he attacked and when he did / Yamashiro hearing this / “As for me,
[I am] of the Prince’s side, Henmi, [Governor of] Yamashiro, hearing this /
you might know [of me] already. / Since I am an aged warrior / I was cut
off by great numbers and / I was delayed [in attending] the prince [at his
death]. / I pray you, act as my second,” so saying / he slipped out the sword
at his waist and / he cut a cross into his stomach and / he took out his
entrails by the handful and / he had just bade farewell [to this world] and
when he did / as soon as Yamanaka saw this sight / since he was a person
of [delicate] sensibility / under his breath was heard a single line of poetry:
/ “I who struck and the man struck together within the same [lotus] calyx
may we not be born?” / saying, he swung his sword in a flash and / as for
the head, it fell away. / The manner of the end of that person / there was
indeed not a single person who did not praise [it].
The Kōnodai describes the death of Henmi in a collation of formulas and
themes. The encounter with Yamanaka is modeled after the death of Taira
Atsumori at the hands of Kumagai Naozane at the Battle of Ichinotani as
described in the Kaku’ichi Heike (9.16) through the character of Yamanaka.
Like Kumagai, 1) he is under pressure by the presence of many colleagues
who will take Henmi’s head if he does not, 2) he demands to know Henmi’s
identity, and 3) he expresses Buddhist sensibilities at the taking of another
warrior’s life.
In addition, by having Henmi call himself “aged warrior,” the author
makes an allusion to Saitō no bettō Sanemori (1111-83) one of the major
figures of the Heike who died in the wars between the Taira and Minamoto.
Not only was he honored with a chapter for himself in the Heike (7.8), but
the play Sanemori was prominent in the nō repertoire. His story is also
invoked in the Kōnodai by Ujitsuna’s vassal Kinkokusai, who calls himself
an “aged warrior” (116), as does Ashikaga Yoshiaki’s loyal vassal, Henmi
Governor of Yamashiro (405). Sanemori, a follower of the Taira, had dyed
his hair black lest he be refused combat by younger men: “. . . it would be
miserable to be scorned by people as an aged warrior” (rōmusha toshite hito
no anadoran mo kuchioshikarubeshi [Takagi I. et al. 1959-60, ii:81]). The
word for “aged warrior” (rōmusha) functions as a formula echoing a
narrative tradition that infuses any single narrative situation with a
JAPANESE TRADITIONAL NARRATIVE
339
poignancy felt for an old man struggling to maintain his dignity as a warrior.
Although the theme of the aged warrior was created in the Heike, the
frequency of references through citation of the diction has resulted in a
narrative tradition in both literary and oral contexts.
The description of the death of Ashikaga Yoshiaki is not as
sympathetic as that of Henmi’s death. The theme of the “standing death”
(tachiji) is used to describe the death of Yoshiaki, who is allowed to
demonstrate his prowess as a warrior by cleaving in twain the helmet of a
huge opponent before succumbing to a shower of arrows (283-309):
As for the enemy soldiers, seeing this / becoming afraid they did not draw
near. / From among the great numbers [of men] / a man announcing
himself as Yokoi Shinsuke / taking a bundle of thirteen [arrows] to his
three-man bow, he fixed [arrow to bow] until none remained and / he shot
for an hour. / These arrows flying across [at Yoshiaki] / were what sealed
his fate. / Completely through the armor the noble Prince was wearing /
they stuck right out of his back. / Valiant as the prince was even so / while
he was distracted / struggling to keep his eyes open / glaring [suddenly] at
the direct vassals of the Hōjō right in the eyes / using his seven-foot threeinch sword as a support he died on his feet. / “Well!” they said, even so /
there was no one who would come near him. / In such a situation / a
resident of Sōshū / announcing himself as Matsuda Yajirō / drawing his
three-foot one-inch [sword] / he came hurrying in front of the lord. / He
probed under the flap of his armor twice with his sword and when he did /
as well you know, his soul had departed and because it had / suddenly he
fell down to the bow hand. / Matsuda saw this sight and / he took his head.
This theme of the standing death or tachiji is found in other epics. In
the Meitokuki, it is used to describe the death of Yagi Kurō, who
bearing wounds deep and slight in five or six places, made a crutch of his
sword, and chanted the nembutsu, saying, “Namuamidabutsu,
namuamidabutsu.” He was walking slowly in the direction of O±miya when
soldiers of Yamana Gunai-sho surrounded him and, in the end, he was
killed. How cruel it was! (Tomikura 1941:89)
However, the most famous standing death is that of Benkei, the warrior
priest who followed Yoshitsune (1159-89), in the fifteenth-century Gikeiki
(Chronicle of Yoshitsune):42
42
McCullough 1966:289. The Japanese text has it as “dying while standing”
(tachinagara shi suru koto [Okami 1959:381]).
340
S. A. THORNTON
Singlehanded he checked the entire enemy host, not a man of whom dared
meet him face to face. One could not even guess at the number of arrows
lodged in his armor. He bent them and let them hang, for all the world like
a straw raincoat wrong side up, with their black, white, and colored feathers
fluttering in the breeze even as obana reeds in an autumn gale on Musashi
moor. . . .
The victorious Benkei, hearing this, planted his halberd upside
down on the ground, rocking with laughter. He stood there like one of the
two Guardian Kings. . . .
After an interval during which none of the enemy ventured to
approach, someone spoke up: “I have heard it said that heroes sometimes
die on their feet. Let someone go up and take a look.” None of his
comrades volunteered, but just than a mounted warrior came galloping past
and the swish of wind caught Benkei, who had indeed been dead for some
time. As he fell, he seemed to lunge forward, gripping his halberd.... Only
after he had remained motionless on the ground for some minutes was there
an unseemly rush to his side.
In time, people realized that Benkei had stood like a statue to
protect his lord from intrusion while he was committing suicide.
The motifs in common are the armor bristling with arrows, the death position
with the body braced against the weapon, the fierce glare of the two
protective deities (niō) at Buddhist temple gates, the hesitation of the enemy
to approach, and the sudden drop to the ground. The “arrow” motif is also
prominent in the description of the death of Satō Tadanobu in the Gikeiki
(204):43
Then he offered his body as a target for arrows, with his armor pushed up
stiffly. The missiles of ordinary soldiers were deflected, but the best
archers found their marks, and soon the arrows standing in his armor were
so numerous that his senses began to fail.
Pulling out one’s entrails by the handful is another standard motif in
later descriptions of death in battle. In the Gikeiki, for example, Yoshitsune
decides to die like his vassal Satō Tadanobu (290):44
With that very dagger he stabbed himself below the left nipple, plunging
the blade so deep that it almost emerged through his back. Then he
stretched the incision in three directions, pulled out his intestines, and
43
Anyone who has seen Kurosawa Akira’s film Kumonosujō will identify the
death under a hail of arrows as a well-recognized theme in popular Japanese narrative.
44
For the Japanese text, see Okami 1959:383.
JAPANESE TRADITIONAL NARRATIVE
341
wiped the dagger on the sleeve of his cloak. He draped the cloak over his
body. . . .
This ripping out of the intestines is even more gruesome in the description of
the suicide of Tadanobu (205-6). Nevertheless, it was a real practice of the
sixteenth century: Father Frois’s description of the suicide of Shibata Katsuie
(1530-83) was considered so indelicate that it was left in the Latin in a
standard history text (Murdoch 1910-49).
The battlefield has special significance, a particular role in the rhetoric
of the sermon in describing suffering as characteristic of the human world.
According to the doctrines of the Tendai school of Buddhism, from which
the Pure Land school derives, in this world are Six Realms or paths of
existence (rokudō): the realms of hell, of the hungry ghosts, of animals, of
the anti-gods, of humans, and of the gods. Normally, one would expect
rebirth exclusively in one or the other. But the Tendai concept of the
interpenetrability of the realms means that no matter the realm into which
one is reborn, one will be able to experience the other realms. This
interpenetrability is experienced through the suffering characterizing each of
the realms and the place of this experience is the battlefield, the place of the
anti-gods or Asuras, the shurajo. In the Heike, Kiyomori’s daughter, the
former empress Kenreimon’in, relates an account of her own life in terms of
the Six Realms and their interpenetrability, her life in the palace (the realm of
the gods), in warfare (shuradō, that of the anti-gods), on the run without
provisions (that of the hungry ghosts), and witness to death by fire (that of
hell; Epilogue.4). The battlefield is representative of the breakdown in the
world order, proof of mappō, and the place of the fall of the house. Those
who should have had everything experience all horror here: Antoku,
Kiyomori’s grandson, who in a previous life had mastered the ten precepts
and been rewarded with rebirth in the estate of emperor, dragged by his
grandmother into the sea during a battle (11.9); Taira Michimori and his wife
Kozaishō—he dead in battle, she, pregnant, a suicide by drowning (9.18 and
19); Taira Atsumori, young and a gifted musician, slain with a sword through
the throat on the beach at Ichinotani (9.16).
The Kōnodai, too, if briefly, makes reference to this entire
interpretation of the battlefield in describing the opening moves of the battle
(212-20):
In the meantime, as for the noble Prince, seeing this sight / the soldiers of
the three provinces at the head of his forces he readied and / they faced the
Hōjō. / For just about an hour they fought with words / and after that the
battle with the first volleys of arrows / and when they were over / they
began to fight with swords and when they did / the war cries clashing
342
S. A. THORNTON
against each other / made this a place none other than the realm of the
fighting Asuras.
Again, later, Yoshiaki’s brother and son, killed in the battle, are described as
being in “the hell of the realm of the fighting Asuras” (551, 584).
The Aftermath Section of the Epic
The battlefield is replete with suffering; nevertheless, it cannot contain
the suffering, which continues into the aftermath of the battle, the third and
final part of the epic. In the Heike, the children of the defeated are slain, as is
the twelve-year-old boy Rokudai (12.9). Like the Empress Kenreimon’in,
the women of the dead survive all, but spend their lives in endless grief,
mourning and chanting the nembutsu for their lovers, husbands, and sons as
well as for themselves (Epilogue.1). Even the victors become victims:
sooner or later, like Kumagai Naozane, as a result of their battlefield
experiences, they retreat into religious life to chant the nembutsu for
themselves and the men they killed.45 In the Kōnodai, Yoshiaki’s nurse,
Rensei, makes her way to the battlefield, engages the ghost of the young
prince in dialogue, and then, as described above, takes the tonsure and goes
on pilgrimage to Buddhist and Shintō holy sites to pray for buddhahood
(502-602).
The epic conventionally ends with a resolution. In some, the tale ends
with the story of a reconciliation: in the Yu≠ki senjō monogatari, the
antagonists “met in the suburbs of Kyoto and made peace” (Hanawa
1940c:734). In others, in the Kaku’ichi Heike monogatari for example, the
tale ends with a story of Rebirth in paradise (ōjō-den). The ending must have
(in the manner of sympathetic magic, shall we say) a salutary effect to
counter all the pain manifested by the narrative, to pacify the ghosts. The
Heike ends with the story of Kiyomori’s daughter, the former empress
Kenreimon’in and her death, accompanied by all the signs of Rebirth in
paradise. Sending the spirit off to paradise is an effective form of
exorcism.46
The story of Kenreimon’s life is a summary of the Heike, a summary
of the story of Taira Kiyomori and his house, a summary of the Buddhist
This is a pattern from Mt. Kōya propaganda traditions. It is also seen in the Ōtō
and the Yūki.
45
46
Not all versions of the Heike actually end with this story, although they always
include it.
JAPANESE TRADITIONAL NARRATIVE
343
doctrine of mappō and suffering in the Six Realms, a summary of the Pure
Land teachings of escape from rebirth in the Six Realms through belief in the
vows of Amida. The story of the life and death of Kenreimon’in is the
summary and conclusion of the Heike monogatari as Buddhist sermon.
In the Kōnodai the third and last aftermath section is intercut with the
end of the battle through the story of Yoshiaki’s horse, which runs all the
way back to Oyumi and breaks up a moon-viewing party being held by
Yoshiaki’s ladies (311-45). The scene again shifts back to Oyumi and a
series of stories of the survivors: the vassals report to their new lord and
persuade him to escape with them to Awa Province (421-44), the ladies of
the palace suffer injuries and it is even suggested that they are raped by
peasants as they flee (445-62), Yoshiaki’s favorite concubine commits
suicide (445-501), and his elder son’s nurse travels to the battlefield,
communicates with his ghost, and enters a temple as a nun to pray for his
soul (502-602).
The multiform theme of the “warrior’s horse” crosses the narrative of
the Kōnodai with a narrative cycle focused on Minamoto Yoshitsune, a
daring general who had defeated the Taira in 1185 and was hounded to his
death in the far north by his brother Yoritomo (1147-99), the first Kamakura
shogun. As described in the Heike monogatari, one of Yoshitsune’s vassals,
Satō Tsuginobu, took an arrow for Yoshitsune at the Battle of Yashima
(1184) and Yoshitsune gave his own horse Black Captain to a priest to pay
for the copying of scriptures for Tsuginobu’s soul (11.3). In the Gikeiki,
Tsuginobu’s brother relates that when Tsuginobu gave his life for
Yoshitsune’s at the Battle of Yashima, he rode to hell on Black Captain
(Okami 1959:205).47 According to the variant of this story related in
Kōnodai senki (337-345), the horse followed its master to the underworld
(336-41):
In ancient times at Yoshitsune’s battle at the beach of Yashima / Satō
Tsuginobu took an arrow meant for him and when he did / [the horse] he
gave, Black Captain, / this horse having circled Tsuginobu’s corpse three
times / in the end dying / he went to the underworld, so I have heard.
The logic of the development of the horse presented for the sake of a
warrior’s soul to the horse that follows its master to hell is clear if one
accepts, firstly, the Buddhist teaching that warriors go to hell for dying and
47
Helen Craig McCullough translates the section as “When my brother Tsuginobu
sacrificed his life for Yoshitsune at the battle of Yashima, the mount he received for his
journey to hell was Tayūguro, a horse given to His Lordship by Hidehira of Ōshū”
(1966:176).
344
S. A. THORNTON
having killed in battle and, secondly, that the means of one’s death are taken
to hell. In the fifteenth-century biography of Yoshitsune, Gikeiki, Satō
Tadanobu speaks of the sword with which he commits suicide as “An
excellent blade! . . . I shall take it with me to hell.” He then shoves the
sword into the open wound he has just cut into his belly with it, saying,
“That’s how I treat the sword I take to hell” (McCullough 1966:205). I have
not seen another example of the warrior’s horse announcing the death of its
master except in Kurosawa Akira’s 1957 film, Kumonosujō (Throne of
Blood/Castle of the Spider’s Web), an adaptation of Macbeth. However, an
old Scottish folksong, “Bonnie George Campbell,” recounting the
appearance of his horse with empty saddle at his home (“toom cam his
saddle all bloody to see, hame cam his good horse but never cam he”)
indicates that this might be a fairly widespread theme, as does the custom of
leading a saddled horse in the funeral cortege of an officer. In the case of the
Kōnodai, we have not only a traditional theme but also a one-to-one allusion
to the Heike cycle.
The story of what happened at Oyumi is reminiscent of the fates of the
Heike survivors, the Heike women dragged out of the sea at the Battle of
Dannoura (11.11) and the execution of male children (11.16, 12.9). The
violence done to Yoshiaki’s ladies is typical of popular stories of the period
(such as the sermon ballad, or sekkyōbushi, Oguri hangan), which emphasize
sex and violence as the “hell picture” of Buddhist sermons (445-62):48
In the meantime the ladies of the Inner Palace / high [ranking] and low
more than two hundred and eighty persons cried out all at once and when
they did / surely even the state of the shrieks in hell / was thus. / Until
yesterday this being a place of fame and honor / they played with the ball
of fortune and / in the morning, [things] having changed, down the road of
ignoring the law of karma / they retreated to their destinations and when
they did / they hurried along on rough stones and / the blood flowing from
their feet / stained the grass on the wayside this / must surely be like the
road to the netherworld. / Some were stuck by horses’ hooves and / and
they died and / some passed to the hands of the peasants and / they came to
an unhappy end and / indeed even the retreat from the capital of the Heike
general Munemori / how could it have been worse than this?
Usually, the horrors of war are restricted to the battlefield, but the Kōnodai
extends the battle to Oyumi and the flight of Yoshiaki’s ladies; if the
48
Taira Munemori (1147-85) was the second son of Kiyomori and head of the
Taira when, in 1183 after a disastrous defeat, they retreated from Kyoto to escape an
advancing Minamoto army.
JAPANESE TRADITIONAL NARRATIVE
345
arrogant lord causes suffering to his vassals and kinsmen in battle, he also
causes suffering to the women and children who survive them. This violence
is also a feature of the Oyumi gosho: the theme of the terrible fate (very
likely at the hands of Hōjō soldiers, but this is not explicitly said) of the
common people of the provinces of Kazusa and Shimosa and their toddlers
lost, trampled, and buried on the beach—even the hardened warriors wept—
has been transferred to the ladies of Yoshiaki’s court. The theme of the fiveand ten-year-old princes, who “had never even walked on the white sands of
the garden” but were led away in the confusion howling for their nurse and
governess, is also transferred to the story of the concubines who had to walk
on rough ground and left blood from their feet on the sides of the paths (45355; Bōsō Sōsho 1912:193). This example provides a very interesting
transition from the traditional theme “children in danger” to what may be a
newer theme, “women in danger.”
The woman Yoshiaki’s most endangers is his favorite concubine, who
commits suicide out of loyalty (463-501):
At this time, most moving indeed [was the case of] / a person exceedingly
beloved of the noble great prince called Aisu no kimi and / she retreated
far and away from the gate but / “A wise man does not follow two princes
/ nor a virtuous woman serve two husbands” she remembered it was said
and / she withdrew into the Inner Palace and / entering her apartments /
next to her skin she put on a white, lined garment and / over that she
layered a robe of figured silk and / she tied on her long crimson culottes
and / her disheveled hair she bound high and / she dyed black her long
brush in an inkstone and / the traces of her hand inscribed on fine crepe
paper [the color] of turning leaves she saw and when she did [she had
written] / “How interesting, now I even from the age of seventeen years /
until the end of my twenty-first autumn / not even for a moment did I
leave the side of the prince. / His love surpassing in beauty like the
chrysanthemum / even in the poem on the season of the dew on the leaves
of the chrysanthemum at Narumi / this which was pledged by that
Emperor Xuanzong to Yang Gueifei / even this pledge of the seventh day
of the seventh month / ‘If in the sky a bird with wings abreast / if on the
earth one branch joined to another,’ saying this / he declared in lover’s
talk. / Now at the point of my life [standing before] the crescent moon
[like a bridge to the next world] / my decision is not to return [but] /
together with you [my prince] [crossing] the river of death / let us
surmount the waves of the pools and shoals,” so writing / even the brush
was shaking as she wrote and / the season being the end of autumn /
remembering [this she wrote] as follows: / “As for me, lost in thought [of
you] I am like the autumn mist [suspended] in the deep grass; as for you
[my prince], on whom I relied, the wind that tears through the trees [has
torn me from you]” / saying this, together with her tears she folded [the
346
S. A. THORNTON
paper on which she had been writing] and / while she put it in her scented
sleeve / facing the west, she pressed her hands together and / finally in a
loud voice she said the invocation of Amida’s name and / she bit off her
tongue and when she did, spitting it out / she lay down with her head to
the north. / The manner of the end of that lady / as truly admirable it is
remembered.
The story of Aisu no kimi is given in the Oyumi gosho-sama, but her
name is not given.49 As the Oyumi gosho-sama notes, “according to the
custom of past and present too,” Yoshiaki had taken ten concubines and
among them was one just twenty who said, “As long as I live, in whatever
world, there is someone [to whom] I must [keep my] pledge” (Itsu made
ikite, itsu no yo ni, tare ni chigirite arubeki [Bōsō Sōsho 1912:193]). The
“lover’s pledge” as theme in the Oyumi has then been much expanded in the
Kōnodai (and indeed reversed from a man’s pledge to a woman’s pledge) in
order to link her story to that of the tragic denouement of the love between
Tang Emperor Xuanzong (r. 713-56) and his concubine Yang Gueifei: he
was forced to consent to her strangulation at the hands of his soldiers because
she was blamed for the rebellion of her protégé and adopted son An Lu-shan
in 755. This story was famous in Japan through the poem by Bo Juyi (772846) “Song of Eternal Woe” (Turner 1976:168-81). In the Kōnodai, the
direct reference is made as follows (481-85):
. . . kano Kensō kōtei no Yōkihi ni chigireru kore wa / fumizuki nanuka
no chikai ni mo / ten ni araba hiyoku no tori / tsuchi ni araba renri no
eda to / mutsugoto ni notamaishi.
. . . this which was pledged by that Emperor Xuanzong to Yang Gueifei /
even this pledge of the seventh day of the seventh month / “If in the sky
a bird with wings abreast / if on the earth one branch joined to
another,” saying this / he declared in lover’s talk.
The original poem is translated by Turner (1976:181) as follows:
49
The name Aisu no kimi could simply have been made up from the verb aisu
(“to love”) and the noun kimi to mean something like “beloved lady” or even “lady who
loves.” I have seen an “Ai no kimi” somewhere. The problem is that the orthography is
a bit strange: the word for “love” is ai and the text has ahi. Since the text does not use
the markings that would indicate a zu rather than su, her name could also be Aizu no kimi
(“lady from Aizu”), a district in Iwashiro Province. She might then have been connected
to the powerful Ashina family. However, Aizu was usually written “Ahitsu” rather than
“Ahisu.”
JAPANESE TRADITIONAL NARRATIVE
347
. . . and her message told of a deep oath that they two only knew. / —The
seventh moon, upon the seventh day / Alone at midnight in the Immortal
Hall they swore / When none was near in private talk they swore / In
heaven as birds that yoked together fly / To fly, or else on earth to
grow as trees / That twine their branches from a single stem.
Just what translation from the Chinese was familiar or available to the
composer is not yet determined. As Watson (1997) notes, the story was well
known both through Bo Juyi’s poem and “its companion piece, the prose
‘Account to Go with the “Song of Lasting Pain”’ written by the poet’s friend
Chen Hong.” It was referred to often in the opening chapter of Murasaki
Shikibu’s novel Genji monogatari (Tale of Genji, c.1000) and more than a
dozen times in the Heike.50 This story of Xuanzong and Yang Gueifei,
although literary and originally Chinese, was both naturalized and circulated
orally through recitation of the Heike and other oral narratives.
Next to nothing is known about Aisu no kimi, and therefore her story
is made up almost entirely of traditional themes and other borrowed
materials. Even the poems she writes are cited from other sources and not
that precisely. Consider the first poem (493):
Omoiiru mi wa fukagusa no aki no tsuyu tanomishi kimi wa kokarashi no
kaze.
As for me, lost in thought [of you], I am [like] the autumn dew [suspended]
in the deep grass; as for you [my prince], on whom I depended, the wind
that rips through the trees [has torn me] from you.
This is an adaptation of a poem by Fujiwara Ietaka (1158-1237) included in
the imperial anthology he edited in 1205, the Shinkokin wakashu≠:51
Omoiiru mi wa fukagusa no aki no tsuyu tanomeshi sue ya kogarashi no
kaze.
As for me, lost in thought [of you], I am [like] the autumn dew [suspended]
in the deep grass; the tip [of the blade] which let me depend on it—oh,
the wind that rips through the trees.
50
Watson’s paper makes clear, however, that in the chapter “Kogō” (6.4) the story
has been adapted to conform to the topos of “the grieving monarch” rather than “the
lover’s pledge.”
51
Also in the Jisanka, compiled from the poems of seventeen poets, including
emperor Gotoba (r. 1184-98), included in the Shinkokin wakashu≠ (Kami 1977:89). The
poem is no. 1337 (Shinpen 1983:244).
348
S. A. THORNTON
More importantly, because she commits suicide out of loyalty, she is a
female comparand to Henmi, Governor of Yamashiro and a “loyal vassal.”
Even the author’s praise of her contains verbal repetition of the same diction
used to praise Henmi, Governor of Yamashiro, who follows his lord in death
(500-1):
. . . kano nyōbō no saigo no shigi / ge ni yasashiku zo oboekeru.
. . . the manner of the death of that lady / truly as admirable it is
remembered.
Compare this with the judgment of Henmi (419-20):
Kano hito no saigo no shigi / homenu hito koso nakarikere.
The manner of the death of that person / not a person was there who did
not praise [it].
Her death is described as “admirable” (yasashiku); the adjective yasashi
resonates with a complex layer of meanings. Because of the lengthy
description of her poems, the word ties in the usual idea of the elegance or
refinement of court poetry and music; indeed, the word is used this way in
the Kaku’ichi Heike (5.11). However, as a traditional formula, it also brings
to mind the courtly warrior like Taira Atsumori, slain in the field, who was
praised in the same text for his “refinement” in bringing a flute to the
battlefield (Heike 9.16). Furthermore, the “old warrior” Sanemori was
praised in the same Kaku’ichi Heike as “admirable” for refusing to retreat
and standing his ground alone against the enemy (Heike 7.8). Thus the
combination of type scenes and diction economically places Aisu no kimi in
the ranks of the courtly warrior, as talented as he is brave. The story of Aisu
no kimi, described in terms of a death in battle, is that of a loyal vassal;
values are not differentiated by sex but by caste. Her story even fills a gap
by providing what is lacking in the text, an example of the traditional theme
of the warrior who chants the name of Amida Buddha as he dies in battle or
by suicide. Aisu no kimi is described in terms of the traditional themes
associated with a warrior in battle—most stunning is the variation on the
description of the warrior’s armor and accouterments. Her story includes
many of the traditional themes that usually describe a warrior at death: she
dresses herself for death (470-73), writes her death poems (474-95), faces
west and chants the name of Amida Buddha (496-97), and only then bites
her tongue and dies (498-501; this motif is often found in later popular
JAPANESE TRADITIONAL NARRATIVE
349
drama and even films).
If Aisu no kimi is one example of an historical person whose life is
told solely in terms of borrowed materials and traditional themes, then the
nurse of Yoshiaki’s son, Rensei, must be a totally fictional character created
to fit the pattern of the fate of the survivors of battle and the women left
behind, a fate that usually involves the themes of religious awakening and
taking the tonsure. Thus, as in other epics, the dead are survived by women
who live out their lives seeking salvation in the afterlife: Tora for Soga Jurō
in the Soga monogatari (Tale of the Soga Brothers), the mother of thirteenyear-old Tokiwa Hachirō in the Ōtō monogatari, and the nurse of the two
executed Ashikaga princes in the Yūki senjō monogatari. The traditional
form and function of the epic as a specific genre demands this pattern of
consolation for the dead as an ending. The common interpretation of the epic
is that because of its religious, sermon content, it functions as a form of
pacifying the dead. Certainly, victors in battle pacified the souls of their
dead enemy by building temples for them, entering their names in Buddhist
death registers and having ceremonies performed for them.
The narrative genre with the structure closest to that of a pacification
ritual is the nō theater, which was developed at the end of the fourteenth
century and came under the patronage of the Ashikaga shoguns. According
to Honda Yasuji, many nō plays are basically stagings or dramatizations of
spirit pacification rituals. The structure has three parts: first, the ritualist
arrives at the ritual site and hears the story of the spirit as a third-person
narrative delivered by a local—the spirit in disguise is actually the spirit
speaking through the mouth of a human medium. Second, the same story is
told again as another third-person narrative delivered by another local
resident, the kyōgen; this retelling is based on the need to translate the
usually unintelligible words of the “victim” under possession. These two
narrations (saimon) act as invocations of the spirit, who appears in his “true
form” in the third part of the play and delivers his story in a first-person
narration. The pacification is achieved through the dialogue (mondō)
between ritualist and spirit (Hoff 1978:141-207).
Rensei’s journey to the battlefield at Kōnodai and encounter with the
ghost of her late charge is in the style of the nō play in general and one play
in particular, Sumidagawa (Sumida River) by Jūrō Motomasa (1395-1459) or
his father Zeami Motokiyo (1363-1443).52 It concerns a mother whose son
has been kidnapped; she has gone mad in searching for him, only to find he
has died in the area of what is now Tokyo, the same general area as that
52
1955.
For the text, see Sanari 1931. For an English translation, see Japanese Classics
350
S. A. THORNTON
of Kōnodai. Thus, Rensei’s plight is compared to hers.
For example, Rensei travels from Oyumi to the battle site. The
journey is described in a traditional narrative passage form called “going the
road” (michiyuki bun), incorporated into the nō only in the fourteenth
century, which uses place names along the route to describe emotional states
through their relationships with other narratives and poems (510-30):
. . . departing Oyumi in the middle of night / when she went, in the waves
on the shore of Yūki / she wrung out her sleeves and skirts. / She indeed
was reminded too of the river of death at the border of the netherworld. /
She passed beyond Mikawa and when she did / “Indeed this must be [the
famous] Matsuyama at Inage” [she thought]. / The wind blowing through
the pines piercing her body / how uneasily the plovers call / on the rapids
of the Kemi River / wondering whether they might have met you [my
prince] / putting her faith in the buddhas and the gods she passed through
the thick-grown bamboo of Funabashi. / When she had gone as far as her
feet would lead her / the ferry man of the Ichi River boat / she asked
whether or not the prince she thought of was there and when she did [he
said] / “For whom do you wait in the area of the hills at Matsudo?” / She
arrived too at Sagami Hill and when she did / while going to the noble
young prince’s grave / while she plucked the flowers of the various
grasses / the tears flowing from her sleeve / imitating a libation of water /
this is the gist of her lament . . .
Of the sites mentioned, major highway stations in the sixteenth century,
several are still stations on the railroad line: Yūki, Mikawa, Kemikawa
(Kemi River), Funabashi, Ichikawa (Ichi River). The composer even “puns”
Kemikawa to make a poem with the standard poetic formula, the place-name
Mogamikawa (line 517).
In this section Rensei cites part of a poem by Ariwara Narihira (82580), hero of the romance Ise monogatari (Tales of Ise), which is also quoted
in Sumidagawa, in both cases in addressing the ferryman at Ichi River (523):
. . . waga omou kimi ari ya nashi ya to koto toeba . . .
. . . she asked whether or not the prince she thought of was there and
when she did [he said] . . .
The poem appears in the play as
Na ni shi owaba, iza koto towan, Miyakodori, waga omou hito wa, ari ya
nashi ya to.
O, birds of Miyako, If you are worthy of your name, Tell me, does my
JAPANESE TRADITIONAL NARRATIVE
351
love still live? (Japanese Classics 1955:151-52)
There are two changes: kimi (“you”/“prince”) is substituted for hito
(“person”), and the inflection of koto tou is changed as it is moved in
position and the syntax changes. Exact verbal repetition is not necessary to
invoke either the play or the original poem: a scene of loneliness and
separation in its multiforms is generated.53
When Rensei arrives at the battlefield, she encounters the ghost of the
young prince; this also happens to the mother in Sumidagawa. The theme of
the encounter with a ghost is the traditional structural basis of the nō. The nō
play very often ends with representations of the pacification of angry spirits
of the dead, as does this play, which presents invocation of Amida’s name as
a service for the boy. This story in the Kōnodai of Rensei’s ritual dialogue
with the spirit (mondō) also crosses narratives with another mondō tradition
carried by other epics. Rensei invokes the great priest-poet Saigyō and his
poem at the grave of the former emperor Sutoku and gives a poem as the
response of Sutoku’s ghost (536-43):
In ancient times Saigyō, I think it might be, / [going] to the grave of the
Sanuki former emperor [Sutoku] / remembering that he had chanted a
poem, [wrote] as follows: / “Good prince, even though you think of your
Again, the diction of another passage in the Kōnodaiis vaguely reminiscent of a
similar passage in the play Sumidagawa (Kami 1977:91-92). When the ghost of the
young prince disappears back into the mound (587-90):
53
Rensei mo on-ato o shitai tatematsurishi ni / shinonome mo akeyukeba / kusa hōbō to
shite/ tsuka nomi nokoreri.
Rensei too as she tried to follow after him / dawn broke and when it did / the grass being
everywhere / only the mound remained.
In Sumidagawa, as the mother prays at her son’s grave, his ghost appears briefly and then
disappears as dawn breaks. The play ends with these lines (Sanari 1931:391-92):
. . . shinonome no sora mo honobono to, akeyukeba ato taete, waga ko to mieshi wa
tsuka no ue no kusa, bōbō to shite tada, shirushi bakari wa Azachigahara to, naru koso
aware narikere, aware nari kere.
Day breaks in the eastern sky. / The ghost has vanished; / What seemed her boy / Is but a
grassy mound / Lost on the wide, desolate moor. / Sadness and tender pity fill all hearts, /
Sadness and tender pity fill all hearts! (Japanese Classics 1955:159)
The formula “aware” also ends the Kōnodai; it is a standard ending for tragic narratives
in oral tradition and performing arts.
352
S. A. THORNTON
resplendent palace of old, after what has happened, what does it avail
you?”54
Sanuki no In is the retirement name of Sutoku, seventy-fifth emperor of
Japan (1124-41), who was forced by his father to retire and on whose son’s
behalf the revolt of the Hōgen civil war of 1156 was fought and lost,
whereupon he was exiled to Sanuki, dying there in 1164. The exchange of
songs (uta mondō or mondōka) at a grave is a well-known theme. The
allusion is to Sutoku’s resentment: he had lost in a succession dispute and
then been exiled. However, the particular exchange including this poem is
recorded as a set only in the collection of popular and religious narratives
called the Shasekishu≠. The first poem is Saigyō’s (in his collection
Sankashu≠) and is cited in several epics in the Heike cycle as being presented
to his wife rather than to the former emperor’s grave (Kami 1977:90).55
The very name Rensei invokes two other narrative cycles. Rensei is
the religious name of Kumagai Naozane, who killed the young Taira
Atsumori, according to the Heike cycle. His story forms the basis of the “old
warrior kills young warrior” type scene (even though there is no historical
evidence that he indeed did kill Atsumori), and his function in the aftermath
section of the story is to pray for Atsumori’s soul—in fact, he took the
tonsure and became quite a famous follower of the founder of the
independent Pure Land movement, Hōnen.
Rensei is also the name of the nurse of Princess Jōruri, the sometime
lover of the tragic hero of the Heike cycle, Minamoto Yoshitsune, brother of
the first military dictator Minamoto Yoritomo. A diary (Munenaga nikki)
records that in 1531 (Kyōroku 4.9.13) a zatō (“blind performer” [Ishii et al.
1990:108]) was performing the story of Princess Jōruri in Odawara, the
capital of the Hōjō domain (Kami 1977:95-96). The Jōruri cycle was a
popular “spin-off” of the Heike cycle and gave its name to the style of
chanting associated with puppet performance of the Tokugawa period (16031867). Here the author of the Kōnodai senki displays a virtuoso command of
traditional strategies of invoking other narratives by substituting a nurse for
the killer in the function of securing the peace of the victim’s soul in the
afterlife.
54
“Yoshiya kimi mukashi no tama no yuka tote mo kakaran nochi wa nan ni
kawasen,” a poem by Saigyō Hōshi (1118-90) from his collection Sankashū and quoted
in many texts, including epics.
55
These include the Hōgen monogatari, Nagato text of Heike monogatari,
Gempei tōjōroku, and Gempei jōsuiki.
JAPANESE TRADITIONAL NARRATIVE
353
Conclusion
The Kaku’ichi Tale of the Heike is probably the most perfect example
of Buddhist historiography, the interpretation of history through Buddhist
doctrine. The epic, the Heike and the others, are informed by the two basic
elements of the sermon. The first is the statement of a religious theme—and
this can be Taoist, as in the case of the Taiheiki, or Confucian as in the case
of the Meitokuki, but most often it is Buddhist. The second is the use of
recent history as a proof of that theme. Even if the theme is Taoist or
Confucian, the epic is constructed as a Buddhist sermon, and the text will in
fact contain a great deal of Buddhist material. The fall of a great house in
battle is set in a religious view of history. Thus the epic is a sermon, and
Kōnodai senki functions in part as a sermon.
In the Kōnodai senki, the narrative of the winners, the Hōjō, is based
on material that can either be documented or is replicated in other, historical
accounts. However, the narrative of the loser, Ashikaga Yoshiaki, Prince of
Oyumi, is almost completely made up of material culled from a range of
popular narrative traditions: religious propaganda stories, the epic in general
and the Heike monogatari in particular, the Yoshitsune cycle in general and
the Gikeiki in particular, the nō play in general and Sumidagawa in
particular, the Princess Jōruri cycle, the Xuanzong and Yang Gueifei cycle,
poetry, and so forth.
There are two interrelated ways to look at this situation. First, this
poem was composed under Hōjō patronage, and its sources were limited to
those provided by the Hōjō: the author did not really know the names of
Yoshiaki’s sons; nor did he have access to Ashikaga or Satomi vassals and
their documents and battlefield stories. Thus, he provided fictional “filler” as
he thought appropriate to the form and function of the text he was
composing. Or, secondly, the Kōnodai senki can be seen as presenting a
calculated manipulation of traditional themes and motifs to legitimate a
transfer of power from one family to the other. The traditional form and
function of the epic places the losers of the battle in a particular relation to
the winners. The Buddhist framework of the epic places responsibility for
the destruction of Ashikaga Yoshiaki on the Final Age of the Dharma. The
Hōjō are vindicated by other sources of authority—Confucianism and the
Japanese gods. The Hōjō acknowledge the angry spirits of the dead as in
need of pacification, but use the traditional references to Tendai and Pure
Land Buddhist eschatology and soteriology both to console them and to
exculpate themselves from responsibility for their deaths. At the same time,
the Hōjō can put the blame squarely on the shoulders of Ashikaga Yoshiaki,
the arrogant lord and “warrior of reckless valor,” by comparing him
354
S. A. THORNTON
unfavorably with Hōjō Ujitsuna, who honors the gods, consults his vassals,
and plans his battles carefully. Yoshiaki is “framed” by the traditional form
and function of the epic as Buddhist sermon and all the elements associated
with it, including the themes and diction of popular, orally delivered
narratives.
It is difficult to speak of separate and clearly differentiated oral and
literary traditions in Japan. There is a vast difference between speaking in
Japanese and writing in Chinese just as there is between performing a script
composed in advance and composing in performance, usually by the blind or
the unlettered. These differences, however, were mitigated over a thousand
years by a process of mutual “feedback.” On the one hand, chirographic
traditions were disseminated through a variety of public oral performances
such as public readings, sermons, lectures, and even secondarily through
citation in plays. On the other hand, as in the case of the Kōnodai senki,
literary composition deliberately co-opted and used the techniques identified
with oral composition. Except for extremes of the scale, then, there is no
distinct literary or oral tradition of composition; it is more correct to speak of
traditional strategies of narrative composition. As the Kōnodai senki
indicates, the epic is a genre of narrative in which historical events are
recomposed in terms of a wide variety of available Chinese and Japanese
literary topoi and popular themes and type scenes.
Clearly, the epic, as the account of a battle and as represented by the
Heike, is a way of rehearsing distant or historical events, a type of
historiology with its own rhetorical structure (form and function) dependent
as much on mythmakng as on manuscripts. And yet, understanding the
gunki monogatari as a narrative genre is crucial to evaluating such texts for
their historical content as well as their historiography: in certain cases, the
gunki monogatari is the only extant narrative account of an historical
incident.56 Because other narratives, war tales and histories, concerning the
battle are available for comparison, Chronicle of the Battle of Kōnodai, an
“admittedly reduced textual record” of traditional narrative strategies (Foley
1992:292), provides an excellent case study for determining the
characteristics and use of traditional narrative strategies in the gunki
monogatari.
Arizona State University
56
This is the case of two texts covering material connected with that of the
Chronicle of the Battle of Kōnodai, Story of the Fall of Nakao Castle and Story of the
Fall of Sasago Castle.
JAPANESE TRADITIONAL NARRATIVE
355
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Makoto. Tokyo: Nihon Hyōronsha.
Takagi I. et al. 1959-60
, et al., eds. Heike monogatari. 2 vols. Nihon
koten bungaku taikei, 32-33. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten.
Takagi T. 1936
Takagi Takeshi. “Senki monogatari.” In Nihon bungaku
daijiten. vol. 4. Tokyo: Shinchōsa.
Tomikura 1941
Tomikura Tokujirō, ed. Meitokuki. Iwanami bunko, 28992900. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten.
Tomikura 1963
. “Gunki monogatari no honshitsu.”
Gunki
monogatari no bōdai to kanryō (tokushu≠): Kokubungaku
kaishaku to kanshō, 28, iv:10-16.
Turner 1976
John A. Turner, trans. A Golden Treasury of Chinese
Poetry. Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Vance 1979
Eugene Vance. “Roland and the Poetics of Memory.” In
Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist
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Watson 1997
Michael Watson. “Modes of Reception: Heike monogatari
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White 1971
John J. White. Mythology in the Modern Novel: A Study of
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Prefigurative Techniques. Princeton: Princeton University
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Yamamoto 1976
Yamamoto Kichizō. “‘Kuchigatari’ no ron: Goze uta no
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Yamamoto 1977
. “Kuchigatari no ron: Goze uta no baai.” [Part 3]
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Yamashita 1976
Yamashita Hiroaki.
“The Structure of ‘Story-telling
(Katari)’ in Japanese War Tales with Special Reference to
the Scene of Yoshitomo’s Last Moments.” Acta Asiatica,
37:47-69.
Yamashita 1994
. Katari to shite no “Heike monogatari.” Tokyo:
Iwanami Shoten.
Yoshida 1959
Yoshida Akimichi. “Monogatari-sō ni tsuite no ikkōsai.”
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Zeami. Fūshi-Kaden. In Zeami, Zenchiku. Ed. by Omote
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Appendix
Account of the Battle of Kōnodai
Translation of Kōnodai senki,
a Sixteenth-Century Japanese Epic57
1.
2.
3.
4.
Account of the Battle of Kōnodai or Account of Kōnodai, Part One
The downfall at Kōnodai
To begin, in considering the year of the battle of Kōnodai in the province of
Shimōsa
[we find] it was around the first ten days in the tenth month of the sixth year of
Tenbun [1537], or so they say.58
57
The author wishes to thank Katsuko Hotelling, Associate Japanese Studies
Librarian at Hayden Library, Arizona State University, for all of her assistance in
translating the work. However, all mistakes are the author’s. The translation attempts to
preserve as much as possible the features of the diction of the original.
362
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S. A. THORNTON
In enquiring fully into the background of the destruction of the noble Prince
[we find] as for that lord, a descendant of the Emperor Seiwa,
the second son of the general Masauji, the younger brother of the noble
Takamoto, Yoshiaki he was called.
Relations between the brothers becoming strained
he went [north] to Michinoku, so it is rumored.
Now then, a futile dispute that the Deputy-Governor General of the province of
Kazusa, Mariyatsu, Governor of Mikawa,
had fought over territory with Hara no Jirō, a vassal serving the Chiba, had lasted
many years.
On account of this, the Governor of Mikawa sent a messenger [north] to Mutsu
and
persuaded Yoshiaki to remove [to Chiba in 1517].
He advanced on Oyumi Castle in which that Hara no Jirō had entrenched himself
and
took it within three years and
established Oyumi as the seat of Yoshiaki.
The samurai of the provinces of both Bōshu≠ (Awa) and Kazusa were without
treachery and
they protected that prince.
As well you know, as for that general
he was fond of waging war and because he was
he mustered the soldiers of the provinces of both Bōshu≠ and Kazusa and
he subjugated Takagi [Governor of] Echizen father and son, children (vassals) of
Hara no Jirō’s house and
driving out the Governor of Shimotsuke and his son, [of the] same [family]
immediately afterward attacking and killing Hara no Jirō
deep in his heart this is the gist of what he thought:
“There is no one waging war to rival me.
Surely, there is no doubt that I shall become general of the Kantō,” he thought,
however
at this time, [one] calling himself Hōjō Shinkurō Ujitsuna
was become [a man] of his times waging war.
Deep in his heart this is the gist of what Ujitsuna thought:
“Indeed the one who was my father invaded the Kantō and
he raised his flag over [the province of] Sōshu≠ and
to himself this is what he said:
‘Someday I shall conquer the Kantō and while recommending [my son] Kurō for
office [at the imperial court],
I shall build a palace in Kamakura, and this is what I want,’ this he declared.
Now it becoming my generation
I shall conquer the province of Musashi and
58
Nengo: year name. In premodern Japan, years were grouped under year or age
names which were changed to commemorate auspicious events or to change bad luck.
They were not named after the reigns of emperors as in the modern period.
JAPANESE TRADITIONAL NARRATIVE
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363
in knowing that I shall soon have the Kantō in my hand
what chagrin to fear Yoshiaki’s might.
Thus even in the words of the ancients
‘The inchworm shrinks
in order to extend [himself]’—now is the time to pay attention [to these words]
debasing myself and drawing near to that prince
awaiting the winds of opportunity, destroying him
after that, I shall extend my power over the eight provinces [of the Kantō], that is
certain.
First, I [must] pull strings,” so [say]ing
preparing gold, silver, and jewels
he sent messengers one after the other and although he expressed his earnest
desire, it was of no use.
This is the gist of what Hōjō thought:
“As for my luckless enemy, in real battle59 shall I decide the outcome,” indeed so
[saying] he was enraged.
“Although good news travels slowly
ill news runs apace,”60 or so they say.
Rumours of this were reported at Oyumi.
Since this was the case,
he thought to take up a position at an advantageous place and
he thought about what would be the best place to stop an attack and
he enquired whether somewhere there might be a good site, and when he did
the places the captains proposed were many, even so [the best among them was
the following]
a tributary of the Tone River
was called the Ichi River and extending to the bow hand [left]
there was a hill called Kōnodai.
As for this mountain,
long ago Yamato Takeru was returning to the capital after subjugating the Ebisu
[natives] of the east [and] just at that time
resting on that mountain
in looking at the depths of water near the bank of the river at the foot of the
mountain [he saw]
[from] somewhere or other, a bird called a stork flying in
beginning to tread the shoals of the river
he greeted the royal prince and because he did
the royal prince in his exceeding happiness
facing that bird, he declared “I give you this mountain,” and because he did
this bird, receiving the imperial decree, always lived on this mountain.
People who saw, naming it, called it Kōnodai [Stork Hill].
As for this mountain, a vassal serving the Ogi[ga]yatsu61 [Uesugi]
59
Hadae o uchiaite: strike his skin, hit him where it hurts.
60
“Although good news leaves the gate, bad news runs a thousand ri.”
364
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S. A. THORNTON
Ōta no Dōkan,62 facing Usui63 Castle, he took it as fiefs [for his vassals], or so they
say.
Having made the river at the foot [of the mountain] a line of defense, he waited for
the enemy facing him, and when he did
with laborers from the three provinces of Bōshū, Kazusa, and Shimōsa
in three days and three nights he built fortifications and
and [there] posted Motoyori, younger brother of the noble Prince and [his own
son] the young prince and
issuing commands to the samurai of the three provinces
he awaited the approaching Hōjō, that was indeed extraordinary.
In the meantime
as for the honorable Hōjō, being stunned by this news
“Before the many samurai of the Kantō swear fealty to him
I shall quickly decide the outcome,” so [saying],
setting out from Odawara on the fourth day of the tenth month
on the fifth, at the hour of the dragon [6-8 in the morning]
he arrived at Edo Castle, famous in the province of Musashi.
He saw the roster of those enlisted [in his cause] and when he did
they numbered more than 20,000 horse, or so they say.
In the meantime
As for Ujitsuna, [there was a man] called Kinkokusai64
he was originally raised at Negoro and
making the fate of this house his fate
in waging war he had not once made a name for failure.
That Kinkoku the honorable Hōjō summoned into his presence65 and
“How now, Kinkoku, listen.
This time hurry and face the forces [of the Prince] and
you shall absolutely decide the outcome.
You will be the first in the charge and
[so] fight a glorious battle!” so [saying]
Kinkoku received an exceptional spring colt and
being exceedingly pleased, this is what he said to Ujitsuna:
“As for what is called the council of this house
lord and vassals having come to a consensus
61
In text, “Ōginoyatsu.”
Sukenaga, 1432-86. Served not the Ōgigayatsu but the Yamanouchi branch of
the Uesugi family, who served as First Ministers for the Ashikaga Kamakura Deputies,
from whom Yoshiaki was descended, and who had been forced out of Kamakura.
62
63
Western district of Kōzuke province and fought over by the Takeda and Uesugi.
64
Ōfuji Kinkokusai, a principal Hōjō strategist.
65
palace.”
Possibly, “this Kinkoku [Ujitsuna] summoned to an audience at the Hōjō
JAPANESE TRADITIONAL NARRATIVE
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365
we consult the omens and when we do
together with the strategy there is no failure.
As for what is called waging war of the Prince’s side
having made their wills one with the prince’s [having submitted to the prince’s
will]
they do not even have a conference and since they do not
the wills of lord and vassal are [only finally] reconciled and because they are
they are a little inferior and because they are
they may not be able to rectify their [way of] waging war [and their army can
never match ours].
Somehow or the other this lay priest will be first in the charge and
because I have had this interview with you
indeed when I have left your presence
although they call me an aged warrior
I will be like the eagle and the crested eagle.”
In the meantime as for lord Hōjō
concealed in the dead of night he crossed the Asakusa River and
Otsu Station still in the deep of night he passed and
waiting for the enemy, on the banks of the Matsudo
what was said at the council of war was interesting indeed.
Ujitsuna sat on a camp stool and
he was taking his rest.
Most importantly [including his son] Ujiyasu
he summoned the many samurai and
this is the gist of the orders he gave:
“Well now, I invaded the Kantō and put it into confusion and
for more than thirty years I have preserved my rule.
This our country is the land of the gods.
As for the gods they do not receive negligence of worship and
surely they will reciprocate with their intercession.
Moreover, according to certain sacred texts
nothing is achieved without the aid of the gods.
Depending on how one shows respect [the gods] increase his power, so I heard
and when I did
even though [Hachiman] is the tutelary deity of the Genji
I worshipped him most importantly at [the shrines in] Izu, Hakone, and Mishima
and
I even restored Wakanomiya [Shrine] and
I worshipped praying for [success in] waging war and
as for the gods, they lodge in the mind of an honest man and because they do
how could there be no sign in today’s battle?
I have heard and since I have
that, as for Yoshiaki, very possibly being a warrior of reckless valor
he will break through the lines facing him.
This being the case, if it is so
parting the numbers of men on our side to the left and right,
capturing in our center the troops on the side of the Prince
366
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S. A. THORNTON
we will bring up reinforcements and press them and when we do
even though they have the might of the Four Kings and Man-eating Devils
in the end we shall take them.”
First of all, as generals on the bow hand
most importantly the honorable Hakone
Matsuda
Oishi
Shimizu
Kano
and Kasawara he assigned and
then, as generals of the right hand side
Tōyama
Kinkoku
Yamanaka
Obata
Tame
Arakawa
and the rest of the samurai[.]
“Keep your eyes on the direct vassals and
while we band together with [us], father and son, in the center
let friend and foe observe our bravery or cowardice.
As for the [greatest] single battle in months and years, there may be nothing to
surpass today.
Sally forth,” so [saying], he gave the order.
As for the soldiers
they heard this and
while they beat the attack drum
they crossed the Matsudo River and when they did
from within the camp of the Prince
Shiizu
Murakami
Horie
Kajima, most importantly,
about fifty horsemen charging up Sagami hill
they saw the numbers of the enemy.
Quickly they returned to camp and
[this is] the gist what they said to the prince:
“In seeing the numbers of men of the Hōjō [we estimate]
they may have exceeded ten [or] twenty thousand.
If they cross that river
as for this single battle, the outcome is uncertain.
The knaves who have crossed the river
may well already number one [or] two thousand.
To clear them off who have no martial spirit, send numbers of men and
drive them back to the river at their rear and drown them and when you do
while the direct vassals readied to face us too are losing heart
surely they shall disperse,” so [saying]
JAPANESE TRADITIONAL NARRATIVE
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367
one by one they said this and when they did
the noble Prince heard and [his adviser said]
“As for the outcome of the battle, it does not depend upon
the numbers of men, great or small but
one relies upon the dispensation of heaven, the fact is.
In these years we did not take to the field66 against these Hōjō and therefore
the Kantō is unsettled.
This time accomplishing the subjugation
we shall pacify the eight provinces.
Grandly, make them cross the river, I say,” he declared and when he did
as for the near and outsider vassals
they gave the appearance of being skeptical.
In the meantime, as for Ujitsuna, quickly crossing the river
parting [his forces] to the right and left
as for the father and son, while they banded together with them in the center
as for the appearance [the two presented] as they awaited the Prince’s forces
even though it was not yet time
they were as [calm as] chickens waiting for their friends
at the games at Tatsuta.67
In the meantime, as for the noble Prince, seeing this sight
the soldiers of the three provinces at the head of his forces he readied and
they faced the Hōjō.
For just about an hour they fought with words
and after that the battle with the first volleys of arrows
and when they were over
they began to fight with swords and when they did
the war cries clashing against each other
made this a place none other than the realm of the fighting Asuras.
As well you know, as for the Hōjō, since they had already discussed this
attacking [in the formation] of a three-quarter moon
capturing the direct vassals of the Prince’s forces [with them] in their center
even though [the fighting] became furious, they attacked.
As for the troops of the three provinces
they were cut off by the enemy from the prince and
they were unable even to draw their bows.
In such a situation
most importantly the great prince
his younger brother Motoyori and the young prince, as for all three
alighting from their horses
they drove off to the east and west the soldiers coming at them from all four
directions and when they did
as for the traces of their sudden retreat
66
Hata o awasenu: clash banners, or fight a real battle.
67
The last two lines are inverted in the Japanese original.
368
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S. A. THORNTON
it was like the disarray of divining sticks.
They fell back and they pushed forward and
up to seventy-three times
they brought in reinforcements and attacked them and because they did
valiant as they were the princes too
were worn out.
This is what the young prince said:
“Hear now, Motoyori, listen.
I bear very serious wounds and
I shall cut my stomach,” he declared and when he did
Motoyori heard and [said]
“In this house there is a code forbidding cutting the stomach.
Why should we do what the Hōjō band want us to do?
we [must] break through the direct retainers
and stab and be stabbed by Ujitsuna and serve [in death] as companions to our
master,” so [saying]
they [tried to] cut their way through [the enemy].68
As for the Hōjō [lords], seeing this
“Those are the princes themselves [coming at us]!
Don’t let them escape,” so [saying]
they took up their halberds.
The samurai nearest the lord
Ishimaki
Kuwabara
Daidōji
Itō
Asakura, most importantly,
thinking this the critical moment they fought and when they did
how sad it was! as for both princes, as for their hearts they were brave, even so
as for their wounds, many did they bear.
Their bodies too being exhausted
in the end they were killed.
In such a situation
as for the noble Great Prince
he eyed the Hōjō [looking for an opponent] and
in seeing the opportunity [he saw]
[it was] a man the height reaching seven feet
in armour laced with black in the Kurokawa pattern
a single warrior met only once in a half moon
carrying a drawn sword of five feet three inches
raising up a great voice this is the gist of what he shouted:
“A vassal serving the Hōjō
as for this man called Andō, even with your pardon
I will come as the noble Prince’s opponent,” so [saying] without waiting for an
answer
68
Hurl oneself into the midst of the enemy while slashing away with one’s sword.
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369
he had come hurrying in front of the lord.
As for Yoshiaki, seeing him
“This is the conduct of a brave man, indeed,” so [saying]
shortly meeting with him
he broke the middle of his helmet right into two and when he did
he [Andō] disappeared like the morning dew.
As for the enemy soldiers, seeing this
becoming afraid they did not draw near.
From among the great numbers [of men]
a man announcing himself as Yokoi Shinsuke
taking a bundle of thirteen [arrows] to his three-man bow, he fixed [arrow to bow]
until none remained and
he shot for an hour.
These arrows flying across [at Yoshiaki]
were what sealed his fate.
Completely through the armor the noble Prince was wearing
they stuck right out of his back.
Valiant as the prince was even so
while he was distracted
struggling to keep his eyes open
glaring [suddenly] at the direct vassals of the Hōjō right in the eyes
using his seven-foot three-inch sword as a support he died on his feet.
“Well!” they said, even so
there was no one who would come near him.
In such a situation
a resident of Sōshu≠69
announcing himself as Matsuda Yajirō
drawing his three-foot one-inch [sword]
he came hurrying in front of the lord.
He probed under the flap of his armor twice with his sword and when he did
as well you know, his soul had departed and because it had
suddenly he fell down to the bow hand.
Matsuda saw this sight and
he took his head.
As for the end of that prince, it simply astounded the eye.
At this time, this was most moving.
The Prince’s mount called Onitsukige [Devil Moon Coat]
was a treasure of a horse.
He saw the end of the prince and
[he reared] folding up his forelegs
two times three times he neighed and
he galloped ‘round the enemy camp and
away from the battle site
69
A Sagami (province) man, a formula meaning a man with a stipend of land
based on service in the government.
370
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S. A. THORNTON
down the road more than fifty leagues all the way to Oyumi
running in barely an hour into the palace
at the end of the garden he completely collapsed.
He snorted
and indeed he neighed on high.
Just then, as for the ladies of the Inner Palace
gathered in the moon viewing pavilion
they were just in the course of viewing the moon.
However, they heard the whinnying voice of that horse and
the ladies high [ranking] and low
at once left the reception room and
upon seeing this horse [they saw]
here and there bearing wounds
while it shed tears of blood
it seemed to be trying to speak, however
it was a being not equipped with the six senses [and] therefore
it could only neigh.
In ancient times at Yoshitsune’s battle at the beach of Yashima
Satō Tsuginobu took an arrow meant for him and when he did
[the horse] he gave, Black Captain,70
this horse having circled Tsuginobu’s corpse three times
in the end dying
he went to the underworld, so I have heard.
“That was the age of wisdom
this the world of the end of Buddhist teachings and of fools of which these are
even the proofs,” so [saying]
all the people high [ranking] and low generally
there was not one person who did not soak his sleeves [with tears].
In such a situation
Sasaki Shirō [and] Henmi no Hachirō
Sano Tōzō and Machino no Jirō
as for them they were pushed back by the enemy and cut off [from their lord] and
they could not be with the prince at his end, this they may well have thought was
regretful.
They regrouped their horses and [and forces] and
they charged the enemy lines and
they were about to die in battle each in his own way, however
just then from a slight elevation
a shouting voice was heard
they got a clear look and when they did [they saw]
Henmi Governor of Yamashiro bearing wounds had been [trying to retreat]
without being noticed.
They leapt from their horses and
“Now, now [how do you fare]!” they said and when they did
this is the gist of what Yamashiro said:
70
To a priest to pay for services for Tsuginobu’s soul.
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“Now, listen, all of you!
I was cut off by great numbers and
I was delayed at the prince’s decease, how regretful it was!
Moreover, [here and] now I shall cut my stomach and
I shall presently be with the prince.
Quickly all of you hurry to Oyumi and
attend upon the young prince the younger brother and
fall back to whatever place and
wait [to see] what he intends to do,” Yamashiro said this
and when he did
being stunned by these words
“See here, as for Yamashiro, there is surely a mistake.
Isn’t it so that loyalty to others is loyalty to oneself?
Each in his own way dying in battle
we too will accompany the prince
and this until the end of time will [bestow] fame [on us].”
They were just about to charge, however
Yamashiro seeing this sight
“Come now, my people, listen a moment to what [I have to say].
‘Seeing the fall of the old king
be loyal to the new,’ so [saying]
Kōsekikō71 left [these words to us].
The elder princes have just been destroyed and when they were
they left the young prince the younger brother and
[we] wait for the time of the phoenix [to rise] and
when [the house] rises for the second time in the world
our princes too who are in the underworld
surely they will rejoice.
When that time comes,
my colleagues, pray for my after life and act as my substitute,” so [saying] he
lamented and when he did
valiant as even these men were
brought to a standstill by his reasoning
their farewells at death to each other
truly moving they seemed.
Thus, the Governor of Yamashiro drew a fan from his waist and
he beckoned the side of the enemy
a vassal serving lord Hōjō
Yamanaka Shu≠rinosuke (Assistant Director in the Office of Palace Repairs) as
soon as he saw this sight
two or three hundred horsemen had come hurrying up [to him].
“Yamanaka am I and
who might you be?
Announce your name,” so [saying] he attacked and when he did
Yamashiro hearing this
71
Warring States strategist of the Jin dynasty.
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S. A. THORNTON
“As for me, [I am] of the Prince’s side, Henmi, [Governor of] Yamashiro, hearing
this
you might know [of me] already.
Since I am an aged warrior
I was cut off by great numbers and
I was delayed [in attending] the prince [at his death].
I pray you, act as my second,” so [say]ing
he slipped out the sword at his waist and
he cut a cross into his stomach and
he took out his entrails by the handful and
he had just bade farewell [to this world] and when he did
as soon as Yamanaka saw this sight
since he was a person of [delicate] sensibility
under his breath was heard a single line of poetry:
“I who struck and the man struck together within the same [lotus] calyx may we
not be born?”
[so saying], he swung his sword in a flash72 and
as for the head, it fell away.
The manner of the end of that person
there was indeed not a single person who did not praise [it].
Thus, Sano
[and] Machino, most importantly,
they quickly hurried to the Inner Palace and
this is the gist of what they said to the young prince:
“Well, our prince was surrounded by the Hōjō and
he is truly dead.
We wished to accompany him but
this is the gist of what Yamashiro the lay priest said:
‘You shall accompany our young prince and
remove him somewhere!’ so [saying] this
he expressed his decision without reserve and because he did
as useless as we are in the life we are living
we are come to serve our lord.
Please quickly fall back,” so [saying]
one after the other said and when they did
the young prince heard and
“Wherever we go
what person is there who will offer protection?
Immediately will I cut my stomach,” so [saying] this
he put his hand to his sword and when he did
they saw this sight and
earnestly did they console him and
in the direction of Bōshu≠ they had him fall back and this
was thought right and proper indeed.
72
It appeared too fast to be seen.
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373
In the meantime the ladies of the Inner Palace
high [ranking] and low more than two hundred and eighty persons cried out all at
once and when they did
surely even the state of the shrieks in hell
was thus.
Until yesterday this being a place of fame and honor
they played with the ball of fortune and
in the morning, [things] having changed, down the road of ignoring the law of
karma
they retreated to their destinations and when they did
they hurried along on rough stones and
the blood flowing from their feet
stained the grass on the wayside this
must surely be like the road to the netherworld.
Some were stuck by horses’ hooves and
and they died and
some passed to the hands of the peasants and
they came to an unhappy end and
indeed even the retreat from the capital of the Heike general Munemori
how could it have been worse than this?
At this time, most moving indeed [was the case of]
a person exceedingly beloved of the noble great prince called Aisu no kimi and
she retreated far and away from the gate but
“A wise man does not follow two princes
nor a virtuous woman serve two husbands” she remembered it was said and
she withdrew into the Inner Palace and
entering her apartments
next to her skin she put on a white, lined garment and
over that she layered a robe of figured silk and
she tied on her long crimson culottes and
her disheveled hair she bound high and
she dyed black her long brush in an inkstone and
the traces of her hand inscribed on fine crepe paper [the color] of turning leaves
she saw and when she did [she had written]
“How interesting, now I even from the age of seventeen years
until the end of my twenty-first autumn
not even for a moment did I leave the side of the prince.
His love surpassing in beauty like the chrysanthemum
even in the poem on the season of the dew on the leaves of the chrysanthemum at
Narumi
this which was pledged by that Emperor Xuanzong to Yang Gueifei
even this pledge of the seventh day of the seventh month
‘If in the sky a bird with wings abreast
if on the earth one branch joined to another,’ so [saying]
he declared in lover’s talk.
Now at the point of my life [standing before] the crescent moon [like a bridge to
the next world]
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S. A. THORNTON
my decision is not to return [but]
together with you [my prince] [crossing] the river of death
let us surmount the waves of the pools and shoals,” so writing
even the brush was shaking as she wrote and
the season being the end of autumn
remembering [this she wrote] as follows:
“As for me, lost in thought [of you] I am like the autumn mist [suspended] in the
deep grass; as for you [my prince], on whom I relied, the wind that tears through
the trees [has torn me from you],”
so [saying], together with her tears she folded [the paper on which she had been
writing] and
while she put it in her scented sleeve
facing the west, she pressed her hands together and
finally in a loud voice she said the invocation of Amida’s name and
she bit off her tongue and when she did, spitting it out
she lay down with her head to the north.
The manner of the end of that lady
as truly admirable it is remembered.
At this time, the noble young prince’s wet nurse
was a lady called Rensei and
as soon as she heard of the prince’s death
she raised her face up to heaven and
casting herself down on the ground
she lamented and she grieved and
“At least I will go to view the body of our prince,” so [saying] this
since she was in the public glare
departing Oyumi in the middle of night
when she went, in the waves on the shore of Yūki
she wrung out her sleeves and skirt.
She indeed she was reminded too of the river of death at the border of the
netherworld.
She passed beyond Mikawa and when she did
“Indeed this must be [the famous] Matsuyama at Inage,” [she thought.]
The wind blowing through the pines piercing her body
how uneasily the plovers call
on the rapids of the Kemi River
wondering whether they might have met you [my prince]
putting her faith in the buddhas and the gods she passed through the thick-grown
bamboo of Funabashi.
When she had gone as far as her feet would lead her
the ferry man of the Ichi River boat
she asked whether or not the prince she thought of was there and when she did [he
said]
“For whom do you wait in the area of the hills at Matsudo?”
She arrived too at Sagami Hill and when she did
while going to the noble young prince’s grave
while she plucked the flowers of the various grasses
JAPANESE TRADITIONAL NARRATIVE
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375
the tears flowing from her sleeve
imitating a libation of water
this is the gist of her lament:
“Yesterday the form of the [young] shogun’s heavenly robes
—how beautiful [his face with its] sidelocks—
he swung his long sleeves [like] snow swirling in the wind,
as for the morning [all] changing again
at the base of this mugwort in the deep grass he has made his dwelling, oh.
In ancient times Saigyō, I think it might be,
[going] to the grave of the Sanuki former emperor [Sutoku]
remembering that he had chanted a poem, [wrote] as follows:
‘Good prince, even though you think on your resplendent palace of old, after what
has happened, what does it avail you?’”
so [saying] when she chanted this to herself
suddenly from the base of the mound the answer of the noble young prince—what
she thought it might be
“As for the traces of the harbor plovers even though they fly back and forth to
Oyumi, as for me in this field of grass there is not even a sound,”
so he sang and when he did
Rensei shed even more tears, however
even from within the grave
what she thought to be the ghost of the noble young prince
wearing helmet and armor
approaching where Rensei lay her head
“[That having come] all the way here you pray for my afterlife
makes me so happy.
As for myself, while being in the hell of the realm of fighting Asuras
as for my soul, being in heaven
it appears as a star called Daikunshō and
I shall receive a second life in this world and
I shall become the master of the eight provinces [of the Kantō].
You, do not grieve too much for me.
Relate in detail to the young prince my younger brother
this time his father the great prince
for his destruction there are three mistakes to blame and
as for the first: although his spirits were high
his martial spirit not consulting the omens
he did not know the fear of heaven [and]
as for the second: he bypassed the main house and
thinking he would become master of the eight provinces
because he thought [of this] deep in his heart
he made the way of heaven [government] a matter of private interest and
as for the third: Mariyatsu Jokan had served him as a follower but
not long after [Yoshiaki] disowned him and because he did
suddenly [Jokan] died.
His resentment becoming an evil spirit
it bore a grudge against his prince.
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S. A. THORNTON
Because of these mistakes
the gods and the buddhas may well have deserted him.
Fate quickly spends its allotted span,” so [saying] he was unable to speak more
and
and he was drowned in tears, however
from the direction of the north a great wind suddenly blowing
in the south a great bell sounded and
in the west a drum was struck with a great boom
in the middle of a square
too from among the [voices] all shrieking at the same time
the honorable Motoyori’s voice being there
“As for [you] young prince
why do you delay?
Now indeed the time for the fighting Asuras,” so saying he shouted.
The young prince too, “Understood,” so saying
he ran out.
Rensei too as she tried to follow after him
dawn broke and when it did
the grass being everywhere
only the mound remained.
Rensei feeling she had wakened from a dream
weeping weeping departing there
she hurried to a certain mountain temple and
at the [age] of thirty-one
she shaved [her head] and
clad herself ill in [a robe] of inky black and
while she wandered the many provinces and the seven highways
at holy Buddhist temples
at holy Shintō shrines she made her obeisances and
prayed to become a buddha, how moving it was!
How moving it was!
third year of Tenshō [1575] year of the junior brother of the wood, year of the
boar, twelfth day of the eighth month.